Ecclesiasticus 36: What the Passage Says

The Chapter in a Sentence

The chapter has two parts. The first is a prayer asking God to have mercy on his people, to act against the nations, to show new signs, to gather the tribes of Jacob, to show mercy to Jerusalem, and to answer the prayer of his servants so that everyone on earth will know he is the Lord. The second part is a set of sayings about telling true words from false ones, and about a wife: her beauty, her speech, and what a man has and lacks with her and without her.

Claim by Claim

1. 36:1
   • The speaker asks God to have mercy on us.
   • God is addressed as the Lord God of all.
   • The speaker asks God to look upon us.
2. 36:2
   • The speaker asks God to send the fear of him upon all the nations.
   • These nations are ones that do not seek after God.
3. 36:3
   • The speaker asks God to lift up his hand against the foreign nations.
   • The speaker asks that the foreign nations see God's power.
4. 36:4
   • God showed himself holy in us in the sight of the nations.
   • The speaker asks that God be magnified among the nations in our sight.
5. 36:5
   • The speaker asks that the nations know God as we have known him.
   • There is no God except God alone.
6. 36:6
   • The speaker asks God to show new signs.
   • The speaker asks God to work other strange wonders.
   • The speaker asks God to glorify his hand and his right arm.
   • The purpose is that they may declare God's wondrous works.
7. 36:7
   • The speaker asks God to raise up indignation.
   • The speaker asks God to pour out wrath.
   • The speaker asks God to take away the adversary.
   • The speaker asks God to destroy the enemy.
8. 36:8
   • The speaker asks God to make the time short.
   • The speaker asks God to remember the covenant he swore.
   • The speaker asks that they declare God's wonderful works.
9. 36:9
   • The speaker asks that the one who escapes be consumed by raging fire.
   • The speaker asks that those who oppress the people perish.
10. 36:10
    • The speaker asks God to crush the heads of the rulers of the heathen.
    • Those rulers say there is no one but themselves.
11. 36:11
    • The speaker asks God to gather together all the tribes of Jacob.
    • The speaker asks God to take them as his inheritance, as he did from the beginning.
12. 36:12
    • The speaker asks the Lord to have mercy on the people called by his name.
    • The speaker asks the Lord to have mercy on Israel.
    • God likened Israel to a firstborn.
13. 36:13
    • The speaker asks God to be merciful to Jerusalem.
    • Jerusalem is the city of God's sanctuary.
    • Jerusalem is the place of God's rest.
14. 36:14
    • The speaker asks God to fill Zion with his oracles, which cannot be told.
    • The speaker asks God to fill his people with his glory.
15. 36:15
    • The speaker asks God to give testimony to those he possessed from the beginning.
    • The speaker asks God to raise up the prophets who have spoken in his name.
16. 36:16
    • The speaker asks God to reward those who wait for him.
    • The speaker asks that God's prophets be found faithful.
17. 36:17
    • The speaker asks the Lord to hear the prayer of his servants.
    • The prayer is asked to be heard according to the blessing of Aaron over God's people.
    • The purpose is that all who dwell on the earth may know that God is the Lord.
    • God is the eternal God.
18. 36:18
    • The belly devours every kind of food.
    • One food is better than another.
19. 36:19
    • The palate tastes different kinds of hunted meat.
    • An understanding heart discerns false speech in the same way.
20. 36:20
    • A perverse heart causes grief.
    • A man of experience will pay such a person back.
21. 36:21
    • A woman will receive any man.
    • One daughter is better than another.
22. 36:22
    • A woman's beauty makes the face glad.
    • A man desires nothing more than that.
23. 36:23
    • If kindness, meekness and comfort are on her tongue, her husband is not like other men.
24. 36:24
    • He who acquires a wife acquires the beginning of a possession.
    • A wife is a help corresponding to him.
    • A wife is a pillar of rest.
25. 36:25
    • Where there is no hedge, the possession is plundered.
    • The man who has no wife will wander about mourning.
26. 36:26
    • No one will trust a well-equipped robber who skips from city to city.
    • In the same way no one will trust a man who has no home and lodges wherever night overtakes him.

Words Worth Explaining

Every language note in this chapter, gathered. These explain what a word meant, never what it means for the reader.

36:1

This chapter opens with a long prayer for the nation, which interrupts the strings of proverbs on either side of it. The chapter and verse numbers of this book vary a good deal between manuscripts and printed Bibles, so these lines carry different numbers in some editions.

36:2

"Fear" in 1611 English covers dread as well as reverence, and the request is that the nations be made to feel God's terrifying power. "The nations" means the peoples outside Israel, what the King James elsewhere calls the Gentiles or the heathen. The King James here follows a fuller Greek text than some copies, which read simply "all the nations" without the clause about not seeking God.

36:3

"Strange" in the King James means foreign, belonging to another people. It carries no suggestion of odd or peculiar.

36:4

"Sanctified" here means shown to be holy rather than made holy, and "before them" and "before us" mean in their sight and in our sight. The two halves mirror each other: God once displayed his holiness in Israel while the nations looked on, and the prayer asks that he now display his greatness in the nations while Israel looks on.

36:6

"Strange wonders" again means wonders of an unfamiliar kind. "Thy hand and thy right arm" is a standard Hebrew figure for power in action, the right arm being the strong one; the phrase runs all through the story of the exodus from Egypt.

36:8

The King James line printed here begins "Sake the time short," a misprint for "Make the time short," which is what the sentence means: bring the appointed end forward. A covenant is a binding agreement with sworn terms; most Greek copies read "oath" here, meaning the promise God swore to Israel's ancestors.

36:9

"Consumed" carries its older, stronger sense: burned up, destroyed completely.

36:10

"Smite in sunder" means strike apart, break to pieces. "The heathen" in the King James simply means the nations other than Israel; it is a word about nationality, not about personal belief or behavior.

36:11

"The tribes of Jacob" are the twelve tribes descended from Jacob's sons, many of them scattered or lost by the writer's day, around 200 BC. "Inherit thou them" uses the language of property passing to an heir: take Israel as the portion that permanently belongs to you.

36:12

In Israelite family law the firstborn son held a privileged position and received a double share of the inheritance. Calling Israel God's firstborn, as Exodus 4:22 does, claims that standing for the nation among the peoples.

36:13

"The place of thy rest" is the temple in Jerusalem, spoken of as the house where God settles and stays, not a place where he sleeps.

36:14

"Sion" is the older English spelling of Zion, the hill in Jerusalem and, by extension, the city itself. "Oracles" are messages spoken by God through a prophet. "Unspeakable" in 1611 means beyond what words can express, not shocking or improper. Some Greek copies divide the line differently, giving "Fill Zion" and then a separate request that the oracles be exalted.

36:15

"Those that thou hast possessed from the beginning" renders a Greek phrase that other copies give as "your creatures from the beginning"; either way the sense is a people belonging to God from the start. The second half is also unsettled: the King James asks that new prophets be raised up, while other copies ask that the prophecies already spoken in God's name be carried out.

36:16

To be "found faithful" is to turn out, in the event, to have been reliable. The line can mean either that the prophets are proved true or, as other Greek copies have it, that people come to trust them.

36:17

"The blessing of Aaron" is the priestly blessing of Numbers 6:24 to 26, which Aaron and his descendants pronounced over the people: "The LORD blesse thee, and keepe thee." Aaron was Moses' brother and the first priest.

36:18

"Meats" in the King James means food of any kind, not flesh in particular. This verse begins a run of short comparisons: the stomach will accept anything, yet taste can still tell one thing from another.

36:19

"Venison" in 1611 means the meat of any hunted animal, not deer alone, and "divers" means various. The verb "tasteth" governs both halves of the comparison: as the palate sorts one game meat from another, so a discerning mind sorts out lying speech.

36:20

"Froward" means perverse or contrary, set against whatever is put to it; it has no connection with "forward." "Heaviness" means grief or low spirits. "Recompense him" means pay him back, and the Greek leaves open whether that means repaying him in kind or simply being able to handle him.

36:21

This line is built as a parallel to verse 18: as the stomach takes any food, a woman will take any husband, and yet the choices are not all equal. "Daughter" here stands for a young woman of marriageable age.

36:22

"Countenance" means the face, so "cheereth the countenance" means makes a man's face brighten.

36:23

"Then is not her husband like other men" means he is better off than other men, not that he becomes a different sort of person.

36:24

"Beginneth a possession" follows a Greek text meaning he makes a start on property; other copies read that he gains his best possession. "A help like unto himself" echoes Genesis 2:18, "an helpe meet for him," that is, a helper matching him. "A pillar of rest" is a building image: an upright post that takes the weight and holds the structure steady.

36:25

Fields and vineyards were marked off and protected by hedges or low stone walls; with no boundary, whatever grew there was open to animals and to passing thieves. The proverb turns that picture on a man with no wife.

36:26

"Well appointed" in 1611 means well equipped and ready for the road, carrying nothing that would slow him down; the Greek word suggests a nimble, quick robber. In the second half the Greek says the man has no "nest," the ordinary word for a bird's, so the comparison is with a creature that has nowhere to return to at dark.