The Contribution of the Language of The Book of Ben Sira to Biblical Hebrew Philology

The Biblical Hebrew dictionaries occasionally use the Book of Ben Sira as important evidence for interpreting difficult biblical words or words with a small number of occurrences, when their meaning in the Bible is uncertain. In such cases, an attempt may be made to use the philological evidence from Ben Sira to interpret these words. To date, no research has systematically collected all the biblical verses containing difficult words that have been analyzed by the biblical dictionaries with the help of philological evidence from the book of Ben Sira. In my article, I discuss the proposed emendation of both the noun נעלים (in Amos 2:6; 8:6) and the verbal form אעלים (in 1 Sam 12:3) to the otherwise unattested BH word נעלם meaning “bribe” and the root צנ"ע (including its nominal and verbal derivatives).