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This volume of commentary on the shorter books of the Apocrypha follows the pattern of the now well established New Testament series.

After a general introduction to the book as a whole, the text is given in short passages, with a commentary directly following each.

The aim of this series is to provide the text of the New English Bible closely linked to a commentary in which the results of scholarship are made available to the general reader. Teachers and young people have been especially kept in mind.

Jesus ben Sira was a Jewish teacher who probably lived in Jerusalem and wrote this book in about 190 BC. Translated into Greek by his grandson, it became popular among the Greek-speaking Jews of the Dispersion and passed into use in the Christian church because of that traditional popularity.

The two books of the Apocrypha treated here have little in common apart from the attribution of their authorship to Ezra (Esdras in Greek), the 'second founder' of Judaism. The commentators resolve the confusion arising from different ways of referring to the various Ezra writings before examining each book separately.