The grandfather wrote it; the grandson carried it to Egypt and translated it — and told us so in the first book preface in history. Jesus ben Sirach ran a kind of wisdom school in Jerusalem around 180 BC, and his grandson's Greek version, with its famous preface, is how the book survived. Sirach is fifty-one chapters of practical religion: friendship, money, speech, table manners, raising children, honoring fathers — all under the banner "the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom." The Church loved it so deeply it simply called it Ecclesiasticus, "the Church's book." Large portions of the Hebrew original, lost for a thousand years, were rediscovered in the Cairo Geniza in 1896.

This book is also available in the Revised Version (1895) — modern spelling.