A Compositional History of Ben Sira in the Context of the Transmission of Instruction Literature in the Ancient Mediterranean

The prevailing scholarly opinion is that the Hebrew original of Ben Sira is an irretrievable holy grail or at best very difficult to retrieve. Scholars of Ben Sira are particularly discouraged by the great variation in the extant manuscript traditions in Greek, Hebrew, Syriac, and Latin. Many despair at getting close to a reliable base text in the original Hebrew. The great variability of the manuscript tradition is often given as the implicit and sometimes explicit reason for not doing any redaction-critical studies of Ben Sira. In this dissertation I offer a blueprint for how, in spite of these difficulties, a compositional history of Ben Sira may be approached, and why this is desirable. I will begin by pinpointing the textual categories to which Ben Sira belongs. I shall focus on late biblical literature and the gnomic literature of the ancient Mediterranean in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, and show how the preponderance of evidence suggests and often demonstrates that these works are for the most part the product of multiple authors. In this section I will broadly describe the types of evolutions these texts undergo, focusing on the nature of the material later authors added to earlier versions of the text. Basing my analysis on the likelihood that Ben Sira was the work of multiple authors and on these patterns of textual accretion, I will focus on Ben Sira and show how the manuscript evidence has likely captured different moments in its textual evolution. Next, with the aid of redaction-critical tools and the patterns I have observed, I will extrapolate regarding passages for which there is no manuscript evidence. Finally, on the basis of these findings, I will offer preliminary analyses of the earlier versions of the book, some thoughts on the dates of composition of the versions of this book, and the relevance of this dissertation to the diachronic study of religious texts in general.