Sirach 43:23–25

Sirach 43:23 — "By his counsel, he has calmed the deep and planted islands in it."

The operative phrase is by his counsel (Greek: en boulē autou; Hebrew likely be-da'ato or be-'etsato). This is not merely God's power but his wisdom-infused deliberate will. Ben Sira has already established in the preceding verses (43:1–22) a systematic hymn to creation — sun, moon, stars, dew, wind, hail, ice — and now he descends to the sea as a climax of creation's grandeur. The verb calmed recalls the primordial chaos: in ancient Near Eastern cosmology (and in Genesis 1:2), the deep (tehom) is the untamed abyss, the symbol of formlessness and threat. That God calms it is not a neutral meteorological observation; it is a theological statement of absolute sovereignty. The chaos does not restrain God; God restrains the chaos. The phrase planted islands is strikingly agricultural — God does not merely permit islands to emerge, he plants them as a gardener does, evoking the Eden imagery of Genesis 2 and suggesting that every act of creation is, for God, an act of intimate cultivation. Islands, for Ben Sira's Mediterranean world, were simultaneously places of habitation, mystery, and inaccessibility — outposts of ordered life in the midst of threatening waters.

Sirach 43:24 — "Those who sail on the sea tell of its dangers. We marvel when we hear it with our ears."

Ben Sira here introduces the epistemological gap at the heart of created wonder. Knowledge of the sea is mediated: those who sail are firsthand witnesses, and even their testimony — which they tell — produces only awe, not comprehension, in those who hear with their ears. This is a moment of rare autobiographical humility in wisdom literature. Ben Sira does not pretend to have sailed these waters himself; he receives the testimony of mariners and is struck by reverent astonishment. The word dangers (Greek: kindynoi) carries the full freight of mortal risk — the sea is not romanticized but encountered as genuinely threatening. Yet within that danger, the marveling community (we marvel) is implicitly the worshipping assembly, the qahal, gathered around scripture and testimony to praise what none of them can fully see. This verse anticipates the patristic and medieval theological insight that creatures function as signs, pointing beyond themselves to the Creator, and that even indirect knowledge of creation, when received with wonder, is a form of praise.

Sirach 43:25 — "There are also those strange and wondrous works in it— variety of all that has life and the huge creatures of the sea."

The Greek word underlying strange (paradoxa, extraordinary or paradoxical things) is significant: the sea's creatures are not merely unusual but exceed ordinary categories of expectation. The variety of all that has life translates a rich Hebrew concept of biological plurality — the sea is not uniform but teeming with differentiated life, species upon species, each a discrete act of divine creativity. The huge creatures of the sea (Greek: kētē, the word also used of the great fish of Jonah) introduces the Leviathan tradition, the mythic sea monster that in Job 41 becomes God's proudest exhibit of power before a humbled and silenced humanity. Ben Sira demythologizes the monster: these creatures are not primordial enemies of God but inhabitants of his domain, subordinate participants in the created order, wonders rather than threats. The rhetorical movement of verse 25 is from the plural and diffuse (variety of all that has life) to the singular and overwhelming (huge creatures), from the general to the climactic, producing a crescendo of awe that carries the reader to the edge of what language can contain.

Typological and Spiritual Senses

The sea, in the Catholic spiritual tradition, is never merely oceanographic. The calming of the deep by God's counsel anticipates and typologically grounds Christ's stilling of the storm (Matthew 8:23–27), where the same divine authority over primordial waters is exercised in human flesh. The mariners of verse 24 who tell of its dangers prefigure all witnesses to mystery — prophets, apostles, evangelists — whose testimony surpasses the hearer's capacity but nonetheless elicits wonder and draws the community toward worship. The huge creatures of verse 25 carry a Jonah-resonance that the early Church read consistently as a sign of death and resurrection. The sea itself, in patristic baptismal theology (see Tertullian, De Baptismo; Cyril of Jerusalem, Mystagogical Catecheses), becomes the font: the dangerous, death-dealing waters are the very medium through which God brings new life.

Catholic tradition reads this passage through the double lens of natural theology and sacramental cosmology. The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that "God, the first principle and last end of all things, can be known with certainty from the created world by the natural light of human reason" (CCC §36, citing Romans 1:20). Ben Sira's sea-meditation is a supreme biblical instance of this: the wonders of the deep are not merely aesthetic but revelatory — the sea tells us something true about God's inexhaustibility, sovereignty, and delight in variety.

St. Basil the Great, in his Hexaemeron (Homily VII), meditates at length on marine creatures as evidence that God's creative power does not diminish with distance from human habitation — the furthest, darkest depths are populated with purpose and beauty. St. Thomas Aquinas in the Summa Theologiae (I, q. 47, a. 1) argues that God created a multitude and variety of creatures because no single creature could adequately represent divine goodness — Ben Sira's variety of all that has life is precisely this Thomistic insight in poetic form.

The phrase by his counsel resonates deeply with the Catholic identification of the Word (Logos) as God's eternal Wisdom, through whom all things were made (John 1:3). The Fathers — Origen, Athanasius, and especially Augustine in De Genesi ad Litteram — read God's creative "counsel" as Trinitarian: Father, Son, and Spirit act as one principle in ordering creation. The calming of chaos is thus not a one-time event but an ongoing providential act, the conservatio mundi (conservation of the world) by which God holds all things in being (cf. CCC §301). Pope Francis, in Laudato Si' (§85), echoes this Siracidic wonder when he insists that each creature reflects "a ray of God's infinite wisdom and goodness" and that human beings are called to a "loving awareness" of the created world — not exploitation, but the reverent astonishment Ben Sira models here.

Contemporary Catholics live in a cultural moment of profound ambivalence about the sea: scientific knowledge of marine biology and oceanography has expanded enormously, yet ecological crisis — ocean acidification, the destruction of coral reefs, the extinction of species — threatens the very variety of all that has life Ben Sira celebrates. This passage invites a specific spiritual discipline: to read ecological data the way Ben Sira reads the mariners' reports — with reverent astonishment rather than utilitarian indifference. When a documentary on bioluminescent deep-sea creatures or whale migration produces a moment of genuine wonder, that is not merely aesthetic pleasure; it is, in Ben Sira's framework, an encounter with the counsel of God written into creation.

More personally, the epistemological humility of verse 24 — we marvel when we hear it with our ears — challenges the Catholic believer to resist the gnostic temptation to need to comprehend God before worshipping him. The sea withholds its full mystery from every observer. So does God. Lectio divina with this passage, especially during times of spiritual darkness or confusion, can reframe the experience of mystery not as a deficit of faith but as an invitation deeper into worship. The proper response to what we cannot fully grasp is not anxiety but doxology.