Ecclesiasticus 7: What the Passage Says

The Chapter in a Sentence

This chapter is a long run of short instructions from a teacher to a student, most of them stated as things not to do. They cover evil and its punishment, seeking rank from the Lord or from the king, judging, offerings and prayer, lying, hard work and farming, friends, a wise woman, servants, cattle, children, daughters, a wife, father and mother, the priests and the portions owed them, the poor, mourners, and the sick. It ends with one rule for anything a person undertakes: remember how your own life will end.

Claim by Claim

1. 7:1
   • The hearer is commanded to do no evil.
   • If a person does no evil, no harm will come to him.
2. 7:2
   • The hearer is commanded to depart from what is unjust.
   • If a person departs from injustice, iniquity will turn away from him.
3. 7:3
   • The speaker addresses the hearer as his son.
   • The hearer is commanded not to sow on the furrows of unrighteousness.
   • If a person does not sow on the furrows of unrighteousness, he will not reap them sevenfold.
4. 7:4
   • The hearer is commanded not to seek preeminence from the Lord.
   • The hearer is commanded not to seek the seat of honour from the king.
5. 7:5
   • The hearer is commanded not to justify himself before the Lord.
   • The hearer is commanded not to display his wisdom before the king.
6. 7:6
   • The hearer is commanded not to seek to be a judge.
   • A judge may not be able to take away iniquity.
   • A judge may come to fear the person of a powerful man.
   • Fearing a powerful man puts a stumbling block in the way of one's uprightness.
7. 7:7
   • The hearer is commanded not to sin against the multitude of a city.
   • One who does not sin against the multitude of a city will not cast himself down among the people.
8. 7:8
   • The hearer is commanded not to commit one sin on top of another.
   • Even for a single sin a person will not go unpunished.
9. 7:9
   • The hearer is commanded not to say that God will look upon the multitude of his offerings.
   • The hearer is commanded not to say that when he offers to the Most High God, God will accept it.
10. 7:10
    • The hearer is commanded not to be fainthearted in his prayer.
    • The hearer is commanded not to neglect giving alms.
11. 7:11
    • The hearer is commanded not to laugh a man to scorn while that man is in bitterness of soul.
    • There is one who humbles and exalts.
12. 7:12
    • The hearer is commanded not to devise a lie against his brother.
    • The hearer is commanded not to devise a lie against his friend.
13. 7:13
    • The hearer is commanded not to make a lie of any kind.
    • The habit of lying results in nothing good.
14. 7:14
    • The hearer is commanded not to use many words in the assembly of elders.
    • The hearer is commanded not to repeat words at length in his prayer.
15. 7:15
    • The hearer is commanded not to hate hard labour.
    • The hearer is commanded not to hate farm work.
    • The Most High established farm work.
16. 7:16
    • The hearer is commanded not to number himself among the multitude of sinners.
    • The hearer is commanded to remember that wrath will not delay.
17. 7:17
    • The hearer is commanded to humble himself greatly.
    • The punishment of the ungodly is fire and worms.
18. 7:18
    • The hearer is commanded not to exchange a friend for any price.
    • The hearer is commanded not to exchange a true brother for the gold of Ophir.
19. 7:19
    • The hearer is commanded not to deprive himself of a wise and good wife.
    • Her grace is worth more than gold.
20. 7:20
    • The hearer is commanded not to mistreat a servant who works faithfully.
    • The hearer is commanded not to mistreat a hired worker who gives himself wholly to him.
21. 7:21
    • The hearer is commanded to let his soul love a good servant.
    • The hearer is commanded not to defraud such a servant of liberty.
22. 7:22
    • The hearer is asked whether he has cattle.
    • If he has cattle, he is commanded to look after them.
    • If the cattle are profitable to him, he is commanded to keep them with him.
23. 7:23
    • The hearer is asked whether he has children.
    • If he has children, he is commanded to instruct them.
    • He is commanded to bend their necks to obedience from their youth.
24. 7:24
    • The hearer is asked whether he has daughters.
    • If he has daughters, he is commanded to take care of their bodies.
    • He is commanded not to show himself indulgent toward them.
25. 7:25
    • The hearer is commanded to give his daughter in marriage.
    • Giving his daughter in marriage accomplishes a weighty matter.
    • He is commanded to give her to a man of understanding.
26. 7:26
    • The hearer is asked whether he has a wife who pleases him.
    • If so, he is commanded not to cast her out.
    • He is commanded not to entrust himself to a woman who is hated.
27. 7:27
    • The hearer is commanded to honour his father with his whole heart.
    • The hearer is commanded not to forget the birth pangs of his mother.
28. 7:28
    • The hearer is commanded to remember that he was born of his parents.
    • The verse asks what the hearer can repay his parents for what they have done for him.
29. 7:29
    • The hearer is commanded to fear the Lord with all his soul.
    • The hearer is commanded to revere the Lord's priests.
30. 7:30
    • The hearer is commanded to love the one who made him with all his strength.
    • The hearer is commanded not to forsake the Lord's ministers.
31. 7:31
    • The hearer is commanded to fear the Lord.
    • The hearer is commanded to honour the priest.
    • The hearer is commanded to give the priest his portion as he has been commanded.
    • The priest's portion consists of the firstfruits, the trespass offering, the gift of the shoulders, the sacrifice of sanctification, and the firstfruits of the holy things.
32. 7:32
    • The hearer is commanded to stretch out his hand to the poor man.
    • Giving to the poor makes one's blessing complete.
33. 7:33
    • A gift has grace in the sight of every living person.
    • The hearer is commanded not to withhold kindness from the dead.
34. 7:34
    • The hearer is commanded not to hold back from being with those who weep.
    • The hearer is commanded to mourn with those who mourn.
35. 7:35
    • The hearer is commanded not to be slow to visit the sick.
    • Visiting the sick will cause the hearer to be loved.
36. 7:36
    • In all that he does, the hearer is commanded to remember his latter end.
    • One who remembers his latter end will never sin.

Words Worth Explaining

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

7:1

This book is a teacher's collection of short pieces of advice. That is why the verses jump from one subject to the next.

7:3

"My son" is how a teacher in this tradition addresses a pupil; the whole book is instruction delivered in that voice, and the son need not be the speaker's own child. The image is farming: a furrow is the trench the plow cuts for the seed, and a sevenfold crop is a spectacular return, so the line pictures deliberate wrongdoing as seed that comes back multiplied.

7:4

The "seat of honour" is a literal place. At a royal court a man's rank was displayed by where he was seated and how near the king he sat, so asking for that seat means angling openly for promotion.

7:5

In 1611 English "justify" did not mean make excuses for. It was a courtroom word meaning to declare someone innocent, so "justify not thyself before the Lord" warns against pronouncing your own verdict of not guilty.

7:6

The judges meant here are the local elders who heard disputes in public, not trained officials. To "fear the person of the mighty" is a set idiom for letting a man's rank bend your ruling; the Greek word for "person" is literally "face," and the same idiom lies behind the older English phrase "respect of persons." A stumbling block is a stone left lying in a path to trip someone, used throughout the Bible for whatever makes a person fall.

7:7

"The multitude of a city" means the assembled citizens, the town acting as one body, whose collective goodwill a man depended on. The second half is compressed even in the Greek and is generally taken to mean "do not bring humiliation on yourself in front of the crowd," the disgrace being what follows on offending them.

7:8

The Greek can be read two ways: do not commit the same sin twice, or do not pile a second sin on top of the first. Either reading runs into the same conclusion, that one is already enough to be punished for.

7:9

Offerings were animals, grain, oil and wine brought to the temple in Jerusalem and handed over to the priests; part was burned on the altar, part fed the priests, part went back to the worshiper. The attitude being quoted treats a large volume of them as a running account that covers whatever else a man does.

7:10

Alms are gifts of money or food to the poor. By this period they were reckoned a religious obligation standing alongside prayer and sacrifice rather than optional charity, which is why prayer and almsgiving sit in a single sentence here.

7:11

"There is one which humbleth and exalteth" is a deliberately indirect way of naming God. Writers of this period often avoided the name and referred instead to what God does. Compare Hannah's song: "The LORD maketh poor, and maketh rich: he bringeth low, and lifteth up."

7:13

"Use not to make" is 1611 English for "do not make a practice of." The verse is about the habit rather than a single lie, which the second half spells out.

7:14

The elders were the senior men of a town, who met as a council and settled its affairs; speaking at length in that gathering claimed a standing a younger or lesser man did not have. The second half warns against the idea that repeating words makes a prayer take effect.

7:15

"Husbandry" is the old English word for farming and has nothing to do with husbands in the modern sense; a husbandman was a farmer. The Greek verb behind "hath ordained" is "created," placing field labor among the things God set up at the beginning.

7:16

"Wrath" standing alone, with no owner named, means God's judgment. The word is used by itself in this way all through the writings of this period.

7:17

Fire and worms together are stock imagery for what becomes of unburied corpses, drawn from the last verse of Isaiah: "their worm shall not die, neither shall their fire be quenched." The surviving Hebrew of this verse reads differently, roughly "the expectation of man is worms," which makes the line a statement about death in general rather than about punishment.

7:18

Ophir was a distant land reached by ship, proverbial for gold of the highest quality. Where it actually lay is unknown, with the Arabian coast, East Africa and India all proposed. "The gold of Ophir" functions here as a byword for the most valuable thing a hearer could picture.

7:19

The Greek word means both "woman" and "wife," and a wife is meant: the advice is not to divorce a good one. A husband in this society could initiate divorce on his own. "Grace" here is charm or attractiveness, not a religious term.

7:20

A "servant" in this book is normally a slave, a person owned by the household. A "hireling" is a free laborer working for wages, usually hired by the day. Both were exposed to being overworked and to being paid late or not at all, which is what the warning addresses.

7:21

Freeing a slave was a real legal act, and Jewish law limited how long a fellow Israelite could be held, with release due in the seventh year. To "defraud him of liberty" is to withhold a freedom that was owed rather than to deny a favor.

7:22

Cattle are cows and bulls kept on a farm.

7:23

"Bow down their neck" is the image of fitting a yoke onto a young ox, an animal broken in while it is still small. Applied to children it means training them to obedience early, and the Greek verb carries the sense of bodily discipline, beating included.

7:24

"Have a care of their body" means guarding a daughter's chastity, on which her prospects of marriage and her family's standing both depended. "Shew not thyself cheerful toward them" is misleading to a modern ear: it means do not be indulgent or overly familiar with them.

7:25

Marriages were arranged by the father, who negotiated with the groom's family and provided a dowry. "A weighty matter" is a heavy obligation discharged: a daughter's future remained her father's responsibility until she was settled in a household of her own.

7:26

The Greek word behind "a light woman" means "hated" or "detested," and it was also the standard legal term for a wife who has been divorced or set aside. The line may therefore warn against binding yourself to a woman you despise, or against taking up with a woman another man has put away. The King James translators read it as a woman of loose morals.

7:27

This pair of lines restates the commandment to honor father and mother found in Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5. The "sorrows" of the mother are specifically the pains of childbirth.

7:29

The priests were the hereditary descendants of Aaron, the only men permitted to serve at the temple altar in Jerusalem, killing and burning the offerings and receiving a fixed share of what worshipers brought.

7:30

"Ministers" simply means those who serve, with no modern sense of clergy attached. Here it covers the temple staff: the priests and the Levites who assisted them.

7:31

Priests held no farmland and lived entirely on assigned shares of what worshipers brought, so this list is their income. Firstfruits: the first and best of each harvest of grain, wine, oil and fruit. The trespass offering: a sacrifice made to make good a wrong done to God or to a neighbor. The gift of the shoulders: the foreleg of a sacrificed animal, one of the cuts the law assigned to the priest along with the cheeks and the stomach (Deuteronomy 18:3). The sacrifice of sanctification: an offering dedicated as holy, most likely the peace or thanksgiving offering, whose meat was shared. The firstfruits of the holy things covers whatever else was set apart for sacred use.

7:32

A "blessing" could also mean a gift you hand to someone. Here a person's giving is not counted as complete until the poor get a share too.

7:33

The gift owed to the dead is the customary provision at a funeral: paying for a decent burial, bringing food to the bereaved household, and in some Jewish practice setting food at the grave. Withholding it was a recognized failure of duty, and the dead could not repay it, which is the point of pairing it with gifts to the living.

7:34

Mourning was public and followed a fixed pattern, seven days of formal grief at the house of the bereaved, with neighbors expected to come and lament aloud with the family. The instruction is about attending, not about private feeling.

7:36

"Remember the end" translates a phrase that can mean your own death and what follows it, or the outcome of the thing you are about to do. The Greek, literally "your last things," holds both senses at once, and translators split over which to bring out.