Catholic Commentary
God's Gifts of Intellect and Moral Awareness
6He gave them counsel, tongue, eyes, ears, and heart to have understanding.7He filled them with the knowledge of wisdom, and showed them good and evil.8He set his eye upon their hearts, to show them the majesty of his works.
Sirach 17:6–9 describes God's creation of human beings with multiple divine gifts: counsel, speech, perception, and especially the heart as the seat of understanding and moral discernment. These faculties enable humans to distinguish good from evil and perceive God's majesty through an interior spiritual vision rather than mere external sensation.
God gave humans not just eyes to see, but a formed conscience to understand what they're seeing — and that moral wisdom is a gift, not a burden.
Sirach 17:6 — The Inventory of Faculties Ben Sira's list — counsel (βουλή), tongue, eyes, ears, and heart — is not arbitrary anatomy. Each faculty is presented as a deliberate divine gift, and together they constitute the human person as a responsive being, one oriented toward God and neighbor. "Counsel" (Hebrew: 'ēṣāh) refers not merely to the capacity to deliberate but to prudential wisdom — the ability to weigh action against moral truth. The pairing of tongue with ears is significant: speech and listening are relational faculties, implying that God created humanity for dialogue, both with one another and, implicitly, with God himself. "Heart" (Hebrew: lēb) in the Hebrew tradition is the seat of intellect, will, and moral sensibility combined — what the Greeks would later separate into nous and thumós. By listing the heart last, Ben Sira gives it a crowning position: the external senses (eyes, ears) serve the inner faculty of understanding. The verse thus constructs a hierarchy of human faculties that ascends from sense perception to rational deliberation.
Sirach 17:7 — Wisdom and the Knowledge of Good and Evil "He filled them with the knowledge of wisdom (σοφίας ἐπιστήμης) and showed them good and evil." This verse bears an unmistakable echo of Genesis 2–3, specifically the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Gen 2:17; 3:5). But the echo is deliberately reframed. In Genesis, the knowledge of good and evil is bound up with transgression and divine prohibition; here, Ben Sira presents it as a gift — something God actively "showed" (ἔδειξεν) to humanity. This is not a contradiction but a sophistication: the capacity to distinguish good from evil is integral to the image of God in humanity, even though that capacity was subsequently wounded by sin. Ben Sira is describing the created order, the state God intended, in which moral discernment is a grace, not a curse. The phrase "filled them" (ἐνέπλησεν) suggests abundance and completeness — not a meager endowment but a rich saturation of wisdom. This is the foundation of what Catholic tradition will later call synderesis: the indelible natural inclination toward the good embedded in every human conscience.
Sirach 17:8 — The Eye of God Upon the Heart "He set his eye upon their hearts, to show them the majesty of his works." This verse introduces a remarkable reversal: after cataloging what human eyes and ears perceive, Ben Sira speaks now of God's eye directed upon the human heart. The divine gaze penetrates to the interior. The Greek ἐπέβλεψεν ("he fixed his gaze") is the same verb used in the Septuagint for God looking upon the lowly (cf. 1 Sam 1:11; Ps 138:6 LXX). The purpose of this divine gaze is revelatory: God looks upon the human heart in order to show them the grandeur of his works. The implication is that the heart — when properly ordered, when its faculties of wisdom, counsel, and moral discernment are operative — becomes a lens through which the magnificence of creation is legible. The majestic works of God (τὴν μεγαλειότητα τῶν ἔργων αὐτοῦ) are accessible not to the naked eye but to the morally and spiritually formed interior person.
Typological and Spiritual Senses Read canonically, these verses anticipate the New Testament understanding of the renewed mind (Rom 12:2; Eph 4:23). Christ, the Wisdom of God incarnate (1 Cor 1:24), is the one in whom all the faculties described by Ben Sira find their perfect expression and restoration. The "counsel" given to humanity finds its fullness in the "Wonderful Counselor" of Isaiah 9:6. The heart set in order to behold God's majesty anticipates the Beatitude: "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God" (Mt 5:8). Spiritually, these verses trace the arc of lectio divina itself: God gifts us with hearing, understanding, and interior sight precisely so that we may receive his Word and return it in praise.
Catholic tradition finds in this passage a rich locus for the theology of the imago Dei and of conscience. The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that the human person is created in the image of God, "capable of self-knowledge, of self-possession and of freely giving himself and entering into communion with other persons" (CCC 357). Ben Sira's inventory of faculties — counsel, speech, hearing, understanding, and heart — maps almost exactly onto this anthropology: they are the equipments of a being made for relationship, freedom, and communion.
Verse 7's gift of moral discernment speaks directly to the Catholic theology of conscience. The Catechism describes conscience as "a judgment of reason whereby the human person recognizes the moral quality of a concrete act" and notes that it is present in the heart of every person (CCC 1778, 1796). St. Thomas Aquinas identified synderesis — the natural habit of first moral principles — as the permanent, indestructible endowment of the practical intellect (ST I-II, q. 94, a. 1). Ben Sira gives this Thomistic abstraction its biblical grounding: it is God who "showed them good and evil," inscribing moral awareness into human nature itself.
St. Irenaeus of Lyon, combating Gnostic denigration of the material world, appealed to precisely this kind of passage to argue that creation — including the human body with its senses — is the work of God, not of a lesser demiurge (Adversus Haereses IV.4.3). The gifts of sight, hearing, and counsel are signs of the Creator's loving intent. Pope John Paul II's Fides et Ratio (1998) likewise echoes verse 8 when it speaks of reason as a pathway toward the contemplation of God's works, insisting that wonder (admiratio) before creation is the beginning of philosophy and theology alike (FR §4). The eye God sets upon the human heart is, in this reading, the enabling grace that makes genuine understanding — not mere information — possible.
Contemporary Catholic life is saturated with noise — digital, political, existential — that fragments the very faculties Ben Sira celebrates. These verses offer a counter-formation. Consider: the "tongue" was given alongside "ears" — a divine design for listening before speaking, a rebuke to the reactive culture of social media. The "counsel" God instills is not mere cleverness but prudential moral deliberation; Catholics are called to form that capacity through regular engagement with Scripture, the Catechism, and the sacraments, rather than outsourcing moral judgment to algorithms or ideological tribes.
Verse 7 speaks urgently to a culture that has largely abandoned the category of objective moral truth. The knowledge of good and evil is not a social construct in Ben Sira's vision — it is a divine gift, inscribed in the heart. Forming one's conscience (CCC 1783–1785) is therefore not an act of arrogance but an act of fidelity to the Creator's design.
Most concretely, verse 8 invites a daily practice: before reading Scripture or entering prayer, to pause and ask God to "set his eye upon your heart" — to open the interior faculty of understanding so that the majesty of his works, in the Liturgy, in creation, and in neighbor, becomes genuinely visible.
Commentary