Sirach is the longest wisdom book in the broader canon — fifty-one chapters of proverbs, hymns, and reflections on the fear of the Lord. Ben Sira touches every corner of life: speech and silence, business and friendship, family and discipline, table manners and grief. The book closes with the "Praise of the Fathers" (chs. 44–50), a hymnic survey of Israel's heroes from Enoch to the high priest Simon — a forerunner of Hebrews 11.
Also known as Ecclesiasticus ("the church book"). The grandson's prologue dates the Greek translation to Egypt c. 132 BC. Significant Hebrew portions survive in the Cairo Geniza and at Masada.
Sirach is part of the Apocrypha, so the reader opens in KJVA by default — KJV doesn't include it.
Our cross-reference dataset comes from OpenBible.info (CC-BY) — a community-curated resource that covers the Old and New Testaments only. The Apocrypha isn't yet in their dataset, so we don't have an arc-map for Sirach on this page.
Sirach is still richly connected to the rest of Scripture — the early church quoted it, later writers built on it, and scholarly cross-reference editions (e.g. the Jerusalem Bible, the Nova Vulgata) catalogue those links. We're tracking the gap and will add Apocrypha cross-references when a permissive open dataset becomes available.