Catholic Commentary
The Judges: A Blessing Upon the Faithful
11Also the judges, every one by his name, all whose hearts didn’t engage in immorality, and who didn’t turn away from the Lord— may their memory be blessed!12May their bones flourish again out of their place. May the name of those who have been honored be renewed in their children.
Sirach 46:11–12 celebrates the Israelite judges who maintained faithfulness to God and moral integrity, declaring that their memory should be blessed and their legacy renewed through their descendants. Ben Sira invokes resurrection imagery—bones flourishing from the tomb—to express confidence in God's power over death and the enduring spiritual legacy of the righteous ancestors.
Fidelity and moral integrity, not achievement, are what make a life worth remembering and renewing across generations.
"May the name of those who have been honored be renewed in their children" adds the dimension of living legacy. In ancient Israel, one's name living on in one's descendants was the primary form of post-mortem continuity. But Ben Sira here raises it to a spiritual category: the children are to renew (not merely preserve) the name—suggesting an active re-enactment of the ancestors' virtuous pattern. The word "honored" (endoxos—literally "in glory," "of glory") connects the judges to the heavenly realm; they have been glorified by God. Their children become the living continuation of that glory in history.
Catholic tradition reads this passage through at least three interconnected lenses that secular or purely historical commentary cannot access.
The Communion of Saints. Ben Sira's liturgical blessing over the judges—"may their memory be blessed," "may their bones flourish"—prefigures what the Church articulates in the Catechism of the Catholic Church: "The Church's communion with the departed is not broken" (CCC 958). The Church prays for and with the dead, confident that death does not dissolve the bond of the one Body of Christ. Ben Sira's prayer is an Old Testament type of this doctrine: the community of the living invoking God's blessing upon the faithful departed, and looking toward their eventual glorification.
Bodily Resurrection. The prayer that "bones flourish again" is a proto-witness to the resurrection of the body, defined dogmatically at the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) and articulated in CCC 988–1004. The Fathers did not miss this: St. Jerome, commenting on Sirach in his letters, noted that Ben Sira's hope for flourishing bones anticipates Christ's own resurrection as the "firstfruits" (1 Cor 15:20). The body is not incidental to salvation; the judges are honored bodily.
Moral Integrity as the Condition of Lasting Glory. The Catechism teaches that "the virtue of chastity comes under the cardinal virtue of temperance" (CCC 2341) and that faithfulness to God requires the integration of body and soul. Ben Sira's criteria—no immorality, no turning from God—mirror the twofold love commandment (Matt 22:37–39). St. Augustine, in City of God (Book XVIII), reads the judges as figures of the earthly Church, whose members must be distinguished not by office but by sanctity of life.
Legacy and Spiritual Fatherhood. Pope John Paul II's Familiaris Consortio (§ 49) speaks of parents and ancestors as transmitters of the faith across generations. Ben Sira's prayer that the honored name be "renewed in children" is a theological charter for Catholic genealogy of faith—not biological descent alone, but the living inheritance of virtue, prayer, and covenantal fidelity passed from generation to generation.
Ben Sira offers contemporary Catholics two concrete challenges embedded in his praise.
First, the criteria he uses to honor the judges—integrity of heart and fidelity to God—cut against the tendency to measure Christian legacy by achievement, influence, or institutional success. A Catholic today might ask: when I am remembered, will it be for the correctness of my external life or the fidelity of my heart? The judges are not praised for their military victories (those are mentioned elsewhere); they are praised for not turning away. Perseverance in ordinary fidelity—in marriage, in prayer, in moral consistency when no one is watching—is the stuff of lasting blessing.
Second, the prayer for renewal of the honored name "in their children" is a summons to intentional spiritual parenting and mentorship. Catholic parents, grandparents, godparents, and catechists are called not merely to pass on doctrine but to re-enact a living pattern of holiness. The question is not only "do my children know the faith?" but "do they see in me a life that makes the faith worth renewing?"
Commentary
Sirach 46:11 — "The judges, every one by his name"
Ben Sira's phrase "every one by his name" is deliberate and weighty. In the Hebrew and Jewish tradition, to be named is to be known by God and by the community; it signals individual accountability and individual honor. The judges—figures such as Othniel, Deborah, Gideon, Samson, and Jephthah—are not collapsed into an anonymous collective but are honored as particular persons with particular histories. This is consistent with Ben Sira's method throughout the "Praise of the Ancestors" (Sir 44–49): history is made by concrete human beings whose choices for or against God carry enduring weight.
The two negative qualifications—"hearts that didn't engage in immorality" and "who didn't turn away from the Lord"—are not merely moral footnotes. They represent the two poles of the Deuteronomistic failure pattern that haunts the Book of Judges itself: sexual and cultic infidelity (the Baal-Peor and Asherah apostasies) and outright abandonment of YHWH in favor of foreign gods. Ben Sira is essentially sorting the judges by the very standard the Book of Judges uses: faithfulness yields deliverance; apostasy yields oppression. The Hebrew term behind "immorality" (zanah / porneía in the Greek) frequently carries the double sense of sexual and spiritual infidelity—adultery against God as much as against a spouse (cf. Hos 1:2; Ezek 16). That these judges "did not turn away" invokes the classic Deuteronomic vocabulary of shub—the turning of repentance but here applied in its negative form: they did not defect.
"May their memory be blessed" (eulogēmenon to mnēmosunon autōn) echoes Proverbs 10:7—"The memory of the just is a blessing"—and functions liturgically. Ben Sira is not merely reminiscing; he is leading a community in an act of praise, invoking a blessing over the dead as a form of intercessory honor. This is a remarkable window into the Second Temple Jewish theology of communion with the faithful departed.
Sirach 46:12 — "May their bones flourish again out of their place"
This phrase is among the most theologically charged in the entire poem. "Bones flourishing" (anathaleō) draws on the rich biblical imagery of dry bones coming to life (Ezek 37), of the just person as a tree planted by water (Ps 1:3), and of the green shoot from the stump of Jesse (Isa 11:1). In the context of a wisdom text, the flourishing of bones "from their place"—from the tomb—carries an unmistakable resurrection resonance. Ben Sira, writing in the early second century BC, stands at a pivotal moment in the development of resurrection faith in Israel (cf. Dan 12:2; 2 Macc 7:9). He does not articulate a fully systematic doctrine, but the prayer that bones might "flourish again" is not merely metaphorical; it is a hope grounded in God's power over death itself.