Ben Sira and the Stoics: A Reexamination of the Evidence‪.‬

In his famous Hymn to Zeus, the early Stoic Cleanthes (d. ca. 232 B.C.E.) declared: "ever omnipotent Zeus, prime mover of nature ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]), ... hail to you! ... All this cosmos, as it spins around the earth, obeys you, whichever way you lead, and willingly submits to your sway." (1) Were these words all that were extant from the Stoics, there would be little for us to distinguish between the Stoic worldview and that of Ben Sira, the Jerusalem scribe who between 185-175 B.C.E. composed in Hebrew his Wisdom of Ben Sira. (2) Nor, however, would there be much to distinguish between this worldview and that of earlier Jewish wisdom literature whether Proverbs, the book of Job, or Qoheleth; or that of the Egyptian Demotic wisdom instructions, Ankhsheshonqy and Papyrus Insinger; or that of prophetic and eschatological texts as varied as Deutero-Isaiah, Daniel, Jubilees, 1 Enoch, the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, the Community Rule, and the War Rule. (3) The belief that the cosmos is ordered and controlled by divine forces can be traced back for millennia in the ancient Near East, among peoples as diverse as the Egyptians, Sumerians, Babylonians, Canaanites, Indians, and Iranians. This order was perceived as continually threatened by evil and destructive forces, such as natural disasters and foreign enemies; and the incessant conflict between order and chaos, from which order always emerged the victor, found symbolic expression in the various formulations of the ancient combat myth. All the works mentioned above, in both their cosmological and historical perspectives, subsumed the combat myth under a more absolute and thoroughgoing notion of divine control of the universe, in which natural calamities and personal and political upheavals became part of the divine master plan itself. For all these texts, as for the Stoics, God's providential rule of the universe is absolute; nothing that exists, whether good or evil, is without a purpose in the divine plan. Yet despite this common notion, the teleological worldviews represented by these various Hellenistic sages, philosophers, and visionaries are quite disparate one from the other. In the eschatological literature, the divine master plan has been revealed to a holy elite, and a future cosmic transformation is envisioned in which the forces of evil will be completely disempowered or eradicated. (4) The Jewish and Demotic wisdom texts view the divinely ordained mechanisms of the cosmos as being essentially unchanging, eternal, and mysterious, ultimately beyond the comprehension of human beings. (5) For the Stoics, objective, certain knowledge of the universe is attainable through systematic human inquiry, and insight into the plans of the deity can be acquired through the "expertise" ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) or "science" ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) of divination. (6) The Stoic cosmos, being neither unchanging nor destined for future transformation, repeatedly undergoes identical cycles of generation and destruction. (7)