On Nebuchadnezzar in Pseudo-Sirach

Pseudo-Sirach is arguably a pseudepigraphon, even though Ben Sira, the protagonist, is referred to in the third person. It is an early medieval Hebrew-language homiletical collection, structured as exchanges between the child prodigy Ben Sira (Jeremiah’s son), and King Nebuchadnezzar. This article offers a general discussion of the structure of the frame-story, in which Nebuchadnezzar and Ben Sira are interlocutors. It contrasts this to another source poking fun at Nebuchadnezzar. Then, the difference between this treatment of the destroyer of the First Temple and how early rabbinic sources treated Vespasian and Titus is considered. The only such locus which comes close to the pattern in Pseudo-Sirach is the subnarrative about how R. Joḥanan ben Zakkai comes to the rescue of Vespasian as the latter, having been informed, while having put on a shoe, that the Romans made him their king, is unable to put on the other shoe. In contrast, the appearance of the Pseudo Nero shaped the early rabbinic narrative about Nero, and if we are to find a Nero parallel to Jewish derisive treatments of Nebuchadnezzar, it is in the Latin Commenta Bernensia to Lucan’s Pharsalia that we can find them.