Sirach 9:2–9

Sirach 9:2 — "Don't give your soul to a woman and let her trample down your strength." The opening is deliberately stark. The Hebrew behind "soul" (נֶפֶשׁ, nefesh) denotes the whole interior life — will, desire, identity — not merely emotion. Ben Sira's concern is not woman as such but the catastrophic self-surrender that disordered eros produces. The image of being "trampled down" (καταπατεῖν in Greek) is military language; the man who surrenders his interior sovereignty to passion becomes a conquered territory. The "strength" (hayil, often translated valor or virtue) evokes Proverbs' ideal man of moral fortitude — and implicitly contrasts with the 'ēshet hayil, the woman of strength (Prov 31:10), who is praised precisely because she does not lead men to ruin.

Sirach 9:3 — The prostitute and her snares. The noun used for prostitute (pornē) connects to the wisdom tradition's personified "Strange Woman" or "Folly" (Prov 7; 9:13–18), who lurks at crossroads and lures the simple. The "snares" (pagides) are trap imagery drawn from hunting — the man who approaches has already made himself prey. The verse counsels avoidance before encounter, not merely resistance during temptation. This is significant: Ben Sira's spiritual strategy is proximate occasion, not willpower in the moment of crisis.

Sirach 9:4 — The woman singer. In Second Temple culture, female entertainers at symposia (Greek drinking parties that had infiltrated Jewish social life) occupied a liminal moral space; they were often slaves or freedwomen whose performance included erotic song and dance. Ben Sira's audience — educated, urban, Hellenized Jewish men — would have recognized the type. The warning is not about music per se but about environments of ritualized seduction where one's defenses are lowered by wine, flattery, and aesthetic pleasure. The "tricks" (technai) — literally "arts" or "techniques" — suggest deliberate, skilled manipulation.

Sirach 9:5 — The virgin. This verse pivots from deliberate sin to inadvertent occasion. Gazing (atenizein) at a virgin risks not only personal temptation but legal-social consequence: in the ancient Near East and in Mosaic law (Deut 22:28–29), a man who compromised a virgin bore restitutive penalties. But the deeper point is the interior act of gazing — staring that converts a person into an object. This anticipates the dominical teaching of Matthew 5:28 by several centuries.

Sirach 9:6 — Prostitutes and the inheritance. The "inheritance" (klēronomia) is a rich theological term. On the literal level it means patrimony — property squandered through dissipation. But in Deuteronomic and wisdom theology, Israel's inheritance is its share in the land, in the covenant, and ultimately in God himself (cf. Ps 16:5–6). Sexual sin, Ben Sira insists, is not merely a private moral failure; it forfeits one's covenantal standing.

Sirach 9:7 — The streets and deserted places. The seemingly mundane advice to avoid wandering urban streets carries moral weight in the wisdom tradition. Proverbs 7:8–12 situates the fatal encounter with the adulteress precisely in the street, at the corner, in the twilight. Deserted places (rhymas erēmas) are spaces without witnesses, without social accountability — the ancient equivalent of anonymity. The wise man structures his environment deliberately.

Sirach 9:8 — Turn away the eye; passion as fire. This is the thematic heart of the passage. The command to avert the eye (apostrepson ophthalmon) rather than merely moderate the gaze reflects an understanding of concupiscence as a force that intensifies with attention. The fire simile (pur) is precise: fire does not stay contained once kindled; it spreads beyond the one who lit it. The note that "many" have been led astray — echoing the downfall of Solomon (Sir 47:19–20) — places individual temptation within a pattern of historical catastrophe. Beauty is not condemned; the gaze that appropriates another's beauty is.

Sirach 9:9 — The symposium with a married woman. The final warning concerns the shared table and the shared cup — spaces of intimacy that erode moral distance gradually. The word "revel" (sumpinein, literally "drink together") situates the danger in convivial rather than explicitly sexual activity. The soul "turns away" (apostrephē) — the same verb used of Israel's apostasy from God — before the body acts. Sin begins in this interior declension of the will, in pleasurable sociality that quietly reorients the spirit toward what is forbidden.

Catholic tradition reads this passage through at least three interlocking lenses.

1. The theology of concupiscence. The Council of Trent (Session V) taught that concupiscence — the inclination toward disordered desire remaining after Baptism — is not sin itself but "comes from sin and inclines to sin" (Decree on Original Sin, §5). Ben Sira's graduated warnings (avoid the occasion, avert the eye, leave the table) map exactly onto what later Catholic moral theology calls the near occasion of sin: the circumstance that, for a particular person, predictably leads to moral failure. The Catechism (§2846) grounds this in the Lord's Prayer itself: "lead us not into temptation" is a petition not merely to resist but to avoid the proximate encounter.

2. The theology of the gaze. St. Augustine, whose Confessions is itself a prolonged meditation on disordered desire, identified the "lust of the eyes" (concupiscentia oculorum, 1 John 2:16) as a form of spiritual pride masquerading as aesthetic pleasure (Conf. X.35). Thomas Aquinas, commenting on the Sermon on the Mount, taught that the first movement of concupiscence — the unbidden glance — is not sin, but the cultivated gaze that entertains and inflames desire is (ST I–II, q.74, a.3). Ben Sira's "turn away the eye" is precisely this Thomistic distinction made practical.

3. John Paul II and the Theology of the Body. In his Theology of the Body audiences (1979–1984), John Paul II drew directly on Matthew 5:28 to develop what he called the "adultery of the heart" — the reduction of a person to an object of use. He insisted this is not a condemnation of the body or of erotic attraction but of the lustful look that strips the other of personhood. Ben Sira's warnings, read through this lens, are not androcentric denigrations of women but a call to the spousal meaning of the body: the body is made for self-gift, not for consumption. The "inheritance" at stake in verse 6, theologically transposed, is the very capacity for authentic love.

Ben Sira wrote for educated urban men navigating a sexually permissive Hellenistic culture — the description fits the twenty-first century almost without alteration. The "streets" where one must not wander aimlessly are now digital; the "woman singer" whose arts ensnare is now the algorithm curating content calibrated to one's arousal patterns; the symposium with another man's wife is now the private message thread that begins as professional courtesy. The passage asks the contemporary Catholic to make concrete, environmental decisions — not to rely on willpower at the moment of maximum temptation, but to structure life so that the kindling is never near the fire. Practically, this means: software accountability tools, honest examination of conscience about media consumption, the recovery of the ancient discipline of custody of the eyes, and frank conversation with a confessor or spiritual director about the specific occasions of sin in one's actual life. The soul has an inheritance. Every accommodation to pornography, to flirtatious digital intimacy, to the cultivated gaze, is a quiet forfeiture of that inheritance — piece by piece, often before any outward act occurs.