Catholic Commentary
The Rainbow: Sign of God's Covenant Glory
11Look at the rainbow, and praise him who made it. It is exceedingly beautiful in its brightness.12It encircles the sky with its glorious circle. The hands of the Most High have stretched it out.
Sirach 43:11–12 calls readers to contemplate the rainbow as a revelation of God's creative power and eternal nature. The passage describes the rainbow as a perfect circle encircling the heavens, made visible by God's hands, inviting both aesthetic appreciation and praise directed toward the divine Creator.
To see the rainbow and praise its Maker is to read the cosmos as a love letter written by God's own hands.
The Typological and Spiritual Senses
The rainbow carries an unavoidable covenantal resonance that Ben Sira activates by contextual implication rather than explicit citation. The original audience, steeped in Torah, would immediately hear Genesis 9:13–17 behind this verse — God's placement of the bow in the cloud as a sign of His covenant (berit) with Noah and with "every living creature." Ben Sira thus invites a typological reading: the natural phenomenon is simultaneously a covenantal sign. To behold the rainbow with wisdom's eyes is to remember God's faithfulness, His mercy that overrode His justice after the Flood, and His pledge never to abandon creation.
In the spiritual sense (sensus spiritualis), the Church Fathers read the rainbow as an image of Christ, who as the eternal Word is the full spectrum of divine light refracted into human visibility. The circle of the rainbow, complete and unbroken, images the eternal divine love made manifest in the Incarnation — a mercy that encircles all of creation.
Catholic tradition illuminates this passage along several interconnected axes.
Creation as Revelation. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (§§32–36) teaches that God can be known through created things by the light of natural reason, and that "the world, and man, attest that they contain within themselves neither their first principle nor their final end, but rather that they participate in Being itself, which alone is without origin or end." Ben Sira's rainbow is a textbook illustration: the creature does not merely exist alongside God but speaks Him. Vatican I's Dei Filius (1870) and Vatican II's Dei Verbum §3 both affirm this natural revelation, and Sirach 43 stands as Scripture's own warrant for it.
The Covenant Sign. The Catechism (§§1150–1152) treats the rainbow (along with fire, water, and stone) as one of the cosmic signs that prefigure the sacramental economy. The bow stretched over the sky by the hands of the Most High anticipates the Cross stretched out by those same hands — an instrument of judgment transfigured into a sign of mercy. St. Ambrose (De Noe, 17) explicitly connects the rainbow-covenant to baptism, seeing in the waters of the Flood and the sign of the bow a foreshadowing of the waters of baptism and the pledge of salvation.
Doxology as the Human Vocation. St. Irenaeus' great principle — Gloria Dei vivens homo ("The glory of God is man fully alive") — finds a corollary in Ben Sira: man fully alive is man who looks at the rainbow and praises its Maker. The human person, uniquely among creatures, can consciously return to God the praise that all creation offers implicitly. This is precisely what the Laudato Si' of Pope Francis (§§85–88) recovers: an "ecological spirituality" in which contemplating natural beauty is itself an act of worship and a school of justice.
The Anthropomorphism of Divine Hands. The Fathers (notably St. Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses IV–V) read the "two hands of God" as the Son and the Holy Spirit — the hands through which the Father creates and redeems. Applied here, "the hands of the Most High have stretched out" the rainbow carries a Trinitarian resonance: every act of creation is Trinitarian in structure, and the beauty of the visible world is the joint work of Father, Son, and Spirit.
Contemporary Catholics live in an age of what Pope Francis calls "rapidification" — a pace of life that forecloses contemplation. Ben Sira's command "Look at the rainbow" is a counter-cultural act of resistance: stop, attend, see. The passage offers a concrete spiritual practice: when you encounter natural beauty — a rainbow, a sunset, a coastline — treat it not as a backdrop to photograph and post, but as a liturgical moment, an occasion for explicit praise. Say aloud, even briefly, "Glory to you, Lord, for making this."
Furthermore, in a cultural moment when care for the environment is sometimes reduced to politics or technology, Sirach 43:11–12 offers a deeper motivation: the earth is not a resource to be managed but a text to be read, written by the hands of the Most High. Laudato Si' calls Catholics to "an attentive reading of the book of nature" (§12). These two verses are a masterclass in exactly that literacy.
Finally, for those who struggle to pray, natural beauty is a doorway. The tradition of theoria physike — contemplation of God through created things — practiced by saints from Basil the Great to Francis of Assisi to Thérèse of Lisieux, begins precisely where Ben Sira begins: with a deliberate look at something beautiful, and a heart willing to be lifted by it.
Commentary
Sirach 43:11 — "Look at the rainbow, and praise him who made it. It is exceedingly beautiful in its brightness."
The imperative "Look" (Hebrew: rā'ēh; Greek: ide) is not a casual glance but a directed, contemplative gaze — the kind of attentive seeing that Scripture elsewhere associates with wisdom. Ben Sira does not say "appreciate the rainbow" or "study the rainbow"; he says look at it and praise him who made it. The aesthetic experience is inseparable from the doxological response. Beauty, for Ben Sira, is inherently relational and theological: it points beyond itself to its Author. The phrase "exceedingly beautiful in its brightness" (Greek: kállos autou en lamprótet) draws on the Wisdom tradition's language of luminous splendor — the same category of glory (doxa/kabod) used of the divine presence and of Wisdom herself (cf. Wis 7:26, where Wisdom is "a reflection of eternal light"). The rainbow's brightness is thus not incidental ornamentation; it is a visible participation in divine radiance.
Crucially, the verb structure in the Greek — praise flows from looking — encapsulates the entire logic of the hymn of creation in Sirach 42–43: the sage moves from observation to adoration, from creature to Creator. This is the contemplative method of the biblical wisdom tradition.
Sirach 43:12 — "It encircles the sky with its glorious circle. The hands of the Most High have stretched it out."
Two remarkable images converge here. First, the rainbow is described as a circle (kyklos) encircling the heavens. Ancient observers of course saw only the arc, but Ben Sira — either drawing on philosophical knowledge of the full circle or writing with theological intent — presents it as complete, whole, and embracing. The circle is the geometric figure of perfection and eternity (no beginning, no end), and its heavenly location heightens the sense of transcendence. The sky is imagined as God's own workshop, and the rainbow His hanging tapestry.
Second, and most theologically charged, is the attribution of agency: "The hands of the Most High have stretched it out." The phrase hands of the Most High (cheires Hypsístou) is a boldly anthropomorphic locution, recalling the "finger of God" in Exodus (Ex 8:19; 31:18) and the "arm of the LORD" in Isaiah. It signals direct divine action — not a secondary cause, not mere natural process, but the personal engagement of God in the world. The rainbow is not an accident of refracted light; it is a deliberate gesture of the Most High.