04_Reymond_224_246 15/07/14 12:18 Pagina 225 THE WISDOM OF WORDS 225 he implies that language can be misleading, that words do not al- ways indicate what they purport to describe, as when he writes: “there is a friend (that has only) the name of friend” (Sir 37,1) 4. In the end, however, Ben Sira’s book is not a treatise on the philoso- phy of language; it mostly concerns practical ways of living a pious, fruitful life, and thus much of what Ben Sira says on the topic of language relates directly to its repercussions on a person and his or her status in society. The impact of language on one’s status is succinctly conveyed in both Hebrew versions of Sir 5,13: wtlpm ~da !wXlw ajwb dwyb !wlqw dwbk Ms A wjylpm ~da !wXlw hjwb dyb !wlqw dwbk Ms C Honor and shame are in the grasp of one speaking quickly (or, derive from quick speech), but the tongue of a person is (often) his downfall (Ms C: … is what delivers him) (Sir 5,13; Mss A and C). Not only does each version of the verse juxtapose the mutually exclusive potential results of speech, “honor” and “shame”, but the version from Ms A represents spoken language as one’s (potential) downfall and that from Ms C as one’s (potential) source of deliv- erance 5. The discrepancies between the Hebrew versions, I assume, are not attributable to Ben Sira himself, but they do reinforce the original idea of the verse, if not also the ambiguities inherent in the orthography and morphology of Hebrew. 4 The Hebrew (in Ms Bm) is bhwa ~X bhwa Xy $a; Ms C is similar. 5 Both the Greek and Syriac translation suggest that wtlpm of Ms A is the preferred reading; see H.P. RÜGER, Text und Textform im Hebräischen Sirach (BZAW 112; Berlin 1970) 40-41. Most early scholars of the Hebrew text as- sume that the word ajwb represents generic speech, though N. Peters in his initial publication from 1902 understands the word to denote rushed speaking. See I. LÉVI, L’Ecclésiastique (Paris 1898-1901) 2:28; R. SMEND, Die Weisheit des Jesus Sirach, erklärt (Berlin 1906) 51, and Sirach, hebräisch und deutsch (Berlin 1906) 9; G.H. BOX – W.O.E. OESTERLEY, “Sirach”, The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament (ed. R.H. CHARLES) (Oxford 1913) 1:333; N. PETERS, Der jüngst wiederaufgefundene hebräische Text des Buches Eccle- siasticus (Freiburg 1902) 328, and Das Buch Jesus Sirach oder Ecclesiasticus (EHAT 25; Münster 1913) 54. The context of Sir 5,13 and the connotations of the Hebrew root both imply that the word denotes hasty or rash speech, despite the more generic translations of the Greek and Syriac (lalia,, mmll).