Catholic Commentary
Injustice, Violence, and the Fall of Nations
6Don’t be angry with your neighbor for every wrong. Do nothing by works of violence.7Pride is hateful before the Lord and men. Arrogance is abhorrent in the judgment of both.8Sovereignty is transferred from nation to nation because of injustice, violence, and greed for money.
Sirach 10:6–8 teaches that unrestrained anger leads to violence, and pride—hateful to both God and humanity—is the root cause of injustice. Ben Sira argues that empires fall when they are corrupted by injustice, violence, and greed, suggesting that God transfers sovereignty among nations as moral consequence.
Unchecked anger breeds violence, pride corrupts nations, and greed brings kingdoms down—but only those who see the pattern can escape it.
Sirach 10:6 — Restrained anger and the refusal of violence Ben Sira opens with a command that is both interpersonal and political: "Don't be angry with your neighbor for every wrong." The word translated "neighbor" (Greek plēsion) carries the full weight of the Torah's love commandment (Lev 19:18) — this is not a stranger but a fellow member of the covenant community. The sage is not forbidding all anger; righteous indignation has its place in the wisdom tradition. He is forbidding disproportionate anger — the reactive fury that treats every slight as a capital offense. The immediate practical consequence follows: "Do nothing by works of violence." The Greek erga bias (works of force/violence) points to a deliberate, habitual pattern of coercive behavior, not a single outburst. Ben Sira sees violence as the inevitable downstream consequence of unchecked anger. This verse operates on the level of the literal sense as counsel for everyday Jewish social life, but it also anticipates the wider political argument of verses 7–8: every act of personal violence is a microcosm of the violence that destroys nations.
Sirach 10:7 — Pride as the root sin, hateful to God and humanity alike Verse 7 pivots from behavior to its interior source: pride (hyperēphania) and arrogance (huperēphanos). Ben Sira identifies pride not merely as one vice among many but as the fountainhead of injustice and violence — a conviction he shares with the whole of the sapiential tradition (cf. Sir 10:12–13: "The beginning of pride is sin; the one who holds onto it will pour out abomination"). The double witness — "hateful before the Lord and men" — is rhetorically significant. Pride is not only a theological offense against the Creator but a social offense against the human community. The proud person refuses to receive others as equals made in God's image, which is precisely why violence and injustice follow. The Greek word bdelyktē (abhorrent) is the same used in the Septuagint for idolatry (cf. Deut 7:25) — a deliberate echo that frames pride as a form of false worship, the exaltation of the self in place of God.
Sirach 10:8 — The fall of nations as moral consequence "Sovereignty is transferred from nation to nation because of injustice, violence, and greed for money." This is the political and theological climax of the cluster. Ben Sira here draws on the Deuteronomic theology of history: the rise and fall of empires is not random but morally intelligible. The triad — injustice (adikia), violence (hybris), and greed (philargyria, love of money) — maps directly onto the three sins condemned in the preceding verses, now projected onto the scale of civilizations. The word philargyria (love of money, avarice) is particularly striking; Ben Sira links the private vice of greed with imperial collapse, anticipating what later tradition would call structural sin. Writing in the 2nd century BC, likely under the shadow of Ptolemaic and then Seleucid domination of Judah, Ben Sira is doing theology in the midst of lived political trauma. He offers his students not despair but a hermeneutic: the suffering of subject peoples is intelligible within God's providential ordering of history, and the arrogance of dominant powers carries within itself the seed of its own ruin.
Typological and spiritual senses In the typological sense, these verses foreshadow the teaching of Jesus, who retraces the same arc from inner disposition to outer act to eschatological consequence. The Sermon on the Mount unpacks anger as the root of murder (Matt 5:21–22) just as Ben Sira traces violence to unchecked anger. The fall of Jerusalem in AD 70, interpreted by early Christians as divine judgment, was read precisely through this Sirachian lens: injustice, violence, and greed had corrupted the covenant people and their leaders. In the anagogical sense, the "transfer of sovereignty" points forward to the definitive judgment of all earthly kingdoms before the Kingdom of God — a theme taken up in Daniel and Revelation.
Catholic tradition uniquely illuminates this passage in at least three interconnected ways.
Original Sin and the Social Order. The Catechism teaches that original sin has not only personal but social consequences: "As a result of original sin, human nature is weakened in its powers, subject to ignorance, suffering and the domination of death, and inclined to sin — this inclination is called concupiscence" (CCC 418). Ben Sira's triad of injustice, violence, and greed is a precise description of concupiscence operating at the political level. The Church's social teaching has consistently maintained that disordered personal sin scales up into unjust social structures — what John Paul II called "structures of sin" in Sollicitudo Rei Socialis (36–37).
Pride as the Root of All Sin. St. John Climacus, St. Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 162), and the broader Catholic tradition have consistently identified pride (superbia) as the queen of the capital sins and the root from which all others spring. Aquinas, following Augustine, argues that pride is disordered self-exaltation that refuses submission to God — precisely Ben Sira's framing in verse 7, where pride is first "hateful before the Lord." The Catechism echoes this: "Pride is disordered self-love... it is contrary to the virtue of humility" (CCC 2094, 1866).
The Moral Intelligibility of History. The Church Fathers, particularly St. Augustine in The City of God (Books IV–V), read the fall of Rome through exactly this Sirachian lens: empires that elevate libido dominandi (lust for domination) over justice inevitably collapse under divine providence. This is not fatalism but faith: God governs history, and injustice is never the final word.
Ben Sira's words land with uncomfortable force in a world saturated with political anger, polarized rhetoric, and the spectacle of powerful nations and institutions brought low by their own corruption. For the contemporary Catholic, verse 6 offers a concrete daily discipline: before retaliating — in a family dispute, a workplace conflict, a social media exchange — to pause and ask whether the anger is proportionate, and whether the next action will be an "act of violence," however subtle. Verse 7 challenges the Catholic to examine the pride that operates not in grand gestures but in the quiet refusal to listen, to be corrected, to serve. Verse 8 invites a genuinely Catholic reading of current events: when institutions, governments, or even ecclesial structures are shaken, the question Ben Sira presses us to ask is not first "who are our enemies?" but "what injustice, what arrogance, what love of money has brought us here — and what does God's justice require of us now?" This is the prophetic vocation of every baptized person: to name sin clearly and to refuse to perpetuate it.
Commentary