Sirach 34

Flipping through my Harper Collins Study Bible, marveling absent-mindedly at its enormity, the title of a passage caught my eye - Dreams Mean Nothing, Sirach 34.1-8 (pg. 1423-4). Struck by the near-nihilistic attitude of the first few lines, I felt compelled to finish it before returning to the Book of Susannah, the original target of my page-flipping. Below is the passage:

The senseless have vain and false hopes,

and dreams give wings to fools.

As one who catches at a shadow and pursues the wind,

so is anyone who believes in dreams.

What is seen in dreams is but a reflection,

the likeness of a face looking at itself.

From an unclean thing what can be clean?

And from something false what can be true?

Divinations and omens and dreams are unreal,

and like a woman in labor, the mind has fantasies.

Unless they are sent by intervention from the Most High,

pay no attention to them.

For dreams have deceived many,

and those who put their hope in them have perished.

Without such deceptions the law will be fulfilled,

and wisdom is complete in the mouth of the faithful.

"What a Debbie Downer of scripture," I first thought. Nevertheless, lines like "From an unclean thing what can be clean?" piqued my interest, resonating an almost proto-Puritanical worldview in which "dreams give wings to fools," a line that seems strangely familiar to me, as if it were used by Shakespeare. After racking my brain, no correlating memory resurfaced. A cursory Google search proved fruitless. Anyone know, or is this just some strange cousin of deja-vu?

Harper Collins gives the full name of the book as Ecclesiasticus, or the Wisdom of Jesus Son of Sirach, also known previously as the The Book of Ben Sira. The author, Jesus son of Eleazor son of Sirach, or Jesus ben Sira - known more commonly as just Ben Sira, was a Jewish teacher in Jerusalem who wrote between 200 and 180 BCE. Translated by his grandson into Greek, Ben Sira's writings became part of the Catholic deuterocannon and were widely read by Jews as a book of instruction. Eventually, the Hebrew version of the book fell into disuse, possibly because it was never included in the Jewish canon, and faded from general memory until the discovery of Hebrew manuscripts in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (pg. 1378-9). Obviously, referring to Ben Sira primarily by his first name, or calling his writings The Book of Jesus, would lead to some complications, hence Sirach.

So was Ben Sira an ancient Israelite Puritan of sorts, seemingly against any and all temporal enjoyment? Not really. The Harper Collins book praises his main achievement as marrying the "learning typical of the ancient Near Eastern and Israelite wisdom traditions" with Mosaic law (1379). Like the "prophets", Ben Sira was simply trying to correct what he saw as false or ungodly behavior in the society around him.

Still, his diatribe against dreams seems a bit extreme, especially when compared to the "If you can dream it, you can do it" attitude of our culture. I suspect, though, that Sirach 34.1-8 simply presents a prime example of how erroneous the practice of interpreting the past through the lens of the present (regardless of how unavoidable it is) can be. According to the footnotes, "dream interpretation was considered a critical and scientific occupation" during the Hellenistic period (1423). Therefore, Ben Sira is primarily critiquing the predictive value of dreams, lumping the practice of such interpretation in with omens and other forms of divination or seeing into the future. Ben Sira is not anti-hope, but anti-dream in the strictest sense of utilizing them to divine meaning.