Sirach 27:22–24

Sirach 27:22 — The Winking Eye and Deliberate Distance

Ben Sira opens with a culturally loaded gesture: the wink (Hebrew qāraṣ, "to narrow or pinch the eyes"). This is not an innocent signal of familiarity; in the wisdom tradition (cf. Prov 6:13; 10:10), the winking eye is consistently associated with the plotting schemer — someone whose face performs one thing while the mind engineers another. The very physicality of the gesture matters: the body itself becomes an instrument of deception. The second half of the verse is equally precise — "those who know him will keep their distance." The Greek hoi ginōskontes auton implies not strangers, but those with experience of him. Ben Sira is describing social wisdom learned through painful familiarity. The double-tongued person is eventually unmasked, but only after damage is done. The wise response is deliberate avoidance — a prudential, not merely emotional, withdrawal.

Sirach 27:23 — Sweet Speech as a Weapon

Verse 23 anatomizes the method of the hypocrite with clinical precision. The temporal contrast is the rhetorical hinge of the verse: when you are present he speaks sweetly (glukainei to stoma autou, "makes his mouth sweet") and admires your words — but afterward (meta tauta) he twists his speech (diastrephei to rhēma autou) and uses your own words as a snare. Ben Sira here anticipates what modern readers might call "intelligence gathering under the guise of friendship." The flatterer does not merely insult behind one's back; he weaponizes what was spoken in trust. The word "trap" (skandalon) carries particular resonance in the Greek tradition — it is the same word used for the stumbling block placed before the blind (Lev 19:14) and for spiritual ruin in the New Testament. The hypocrisy here is not passive dishonesty but active predation.

Sirach 27:24 — A Double Condemnation

The final verse escalates dramatically from social observation to moral verdict. The sage steps out of the third person and speaks autobiographically: "I have hated many things, but nothing like him." This is a wisdom teacher wielding the rhetorical device of climax — after cataloguing many wrongs throughout his book, Ben Sira singles out the double-tongued hypocrite as uniquely contemptible. The Hebrew wisdom tradition reserves strong language about hatred precisely because it is not deployed casually. The final line — "The Lord will hate him" — is the theological capstone. This is not merely Ben Sira's personal revulsion transposed onto God; it is a claim grounded in the consistent biblical teaching that God, who is truth itself, is fundamentally opposed to deception (cf. Prov 12:22; Ps 5:6). The verse implicitly frames duplicity not as a personality flaw but as a theological offense — a violation of the divine order of speech, trust, and covenant fidelity.

The Typological and Spiritual Senses

In the spiritual reading of the Fathers, the double-tongued man becomes a figure for the diabolos — the "slanderer" or "divider" — whose very name in Greek means one who throws across, disrupts, and separates. The winking eye and honeyed speech recall the serpent of Genesis 3, who spoke pleasingly while concealing a lethal agenda. At the typological level, this passage anticipates Judas Iscariot, whose kiss — the supreme gesture of affection — became history's most devastating act of betrayal. Ben Sira's hypocrite enacts in miniature what Judas enacts on the cosmic stage: using proximity, warmth, and apparent admiration as the delivery mechanism for treachery.