This blew me away!
“Do not exalt yourself…” Sirach 1:26-30 NRSVCE
One of the great delights (and there are many) of listening every day to the podcast The Bible-in-a-Year with Father Mike Schmitz, is Father Mike introducing me to Sirach. It is a book of Wisdom, like Proverbs, but on steroids. It is advice for living well and in harmony, passed on from father to son. It is voluminous and rich beyond measure. This Wisdom book touches every aspect of the human heart.
If you desire wisdom, keep the commandments,
and the Lord will lavish her upon you.
For the fear of the Lord is wisdom and discipline,
fidelity and humility are his delight.
Do not disobey the fear of the Lord;
do not approach him with a divided mind.
Do not be a hypocrite before others,
and keep watch over your lips.
Do not exalt yourself, or you may fall
and bring dishonor upon yourself.
The Lord will reveal your secrets
and overthrow you before the whole congregation,
because you did not come in the fear of the Lord,
and your heart was full of deceit.
The Book of Sirach was removed from the Protestant Bible but appears in the Apocrypha. The Book also gratefully lives on in the Deuterocanonical Books in context in the Old Testament of Catholic Bibles. Just in case you wondered about the provenance of Sirach it was discovered to be in two of the Dead Sea Scrolls long after it was removed from the body of the Holy Bible by Protestants.
Sirach is so worth your time. I hope you’ll come back to it time after time.
I regret not knowing these Books until recently. Are Maccabees 1 and 2 in the Orthodox Bible?