Gender in the Book of Ben Sira

Scholars who accept Ben Sira’s comments on women at face-value or ignore parallel comments about men preclude fundamental questions about the functions of these statements and about their contexts. Gender in the Book of Ben Sira provides a distinctly-different perspective on the discourse of gender in the extant Hebrew manuscripts. The focus on wordplay, genre-constraints, and topics named in the book’s subtitle—Divine Wisdom, Erotic Poetry, and the Garden of Eden—expands the boundaries for studies of gender.