Is Sirach Misogynistic? Reading a Hard Text as Orthodox Christians

A closer look at Sirach 42:13–14 shows not a hatred of women, but a sober—if jarring—warning to young men, once we read it in context and within the Church’s larger vision of Scripture.

“Imagine Having Sirach in Your Bible…”

I’ve been doing a good deal of study on Sirach, so it piqued my interest when a Reformed pastor friend of mine posted a bit of a jab online:

“Imagine having Sirach as a book in your Bible:

‘From garments comes the moth, and from a woman comes woman’s wickedness. Better is the wickedness of a man than a woman who does good; it is woman who brings shame and disgrace’ (Sir 42:13–14).”

If that’s all you see, “misogyny” feels like the obvious label. To his credit, in online discussion with me, he framed three possibilities:

• either you agree with this as a true description of women;

• you disagree and so must reject Sirach as Scripture;

• or you are misunderstanding Sirach and need a better reading.

As an Orthodox Christian who accepts Sirach as Scripture—and as someone who has spent the last several years studying the so‑called “Apocrypha” for graduate work and podcast projects—I clearly take that third option. But “we’re misunderstanding it” can’t just be a hand‑wave. We need to show how this text can be read in a way that is honest about its sharpness, faithful to its context, and coherent with the rest of Scripture.

Jesus Ben Sirach 1860 woodcut by Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld (Wikipedia)

What Kind of Book Is Sirach, and Who Is It For?

First, we have to remember what Sirach is and what it is trying to do. Sirach (or, more formally, The Wisdom of Jesus, Son of Sirach) is a Second Temple Jewish wisdom book, written in Hebrew and preserved for us in Greek in the Septuagint—arguably the Old Testament of the early Church.¹ It emerges essentially from a wisdom school for young men in Jerusalem—future leaders, scholars, and household heads—being formed by an older Jewish sage.

The tone is often like Proverbs: punchy, vivid, morally instructive, sometimes deliberately overstated.

Listen to our introduction to Sirach on Ancient Faith Radio…

That context matters. Sirach is not a neutral sociological survey of “What are women like?” It is a collection of exhortations addressed to young men, full of fatherly warnings about temptations, dangers, and responsibilities. The “you” in Sirach is almost always a young male listener, father or not.

As Fr. Patrick Reardon notes, Sirach is also written into a particular cultural crisis: many Jews were embarrassed by the Law and attracted to Hellenistic morals and social freedoms—including looser relations between the sexes. Sirach writes to stiffen the spine of young Jewish men—and fathers—in a world where it was starting to feel shameful to be distinct and faithful.

When you put those together—wisdom rhetoric, young male audience, moral crisis—you should expect two things:

• Rhetorical hyperbole: overstatement to make a point stick.

• Targeted warnings: “Watch out for this kind of woman / this kind of man / this kind of friend.” It is a mistake to assume an isolated text applies to all women or all men.²

Sometimes Sirach is more like a coach giving a frank pep talk in the locker room than a carefully nuanced textbook on life.

Hard Texts Are Not a “Sirach Problem”

We also need to be honest: this is not a problem unique to Sirach—or to the “Apocrypha”/“Bad” Books of the Bible.

If the standard is, “If an unbeliever can quote this and say ‘Imagine having to believe this!’ then it cannot be Scripture,” then large portions of the universally accepted Old Testament are in trouble.

Just a few examples that conservative Protestants affirm without hesitation:

• The command to destroy the Canaanites in Joshua, including women and children, is regularly cited by atheists as morally indefensible.

• The nightmare violence of Judges—think of the Levite’s concubine in Judges 19—does not require any help to scandalize modern readers.

• Some passages speak of infants dashed to pieces and women taken in war.

If our move is, “I cannot see how this could possibly be morally coherent, therefore this book must not be Scripture,” that move does not stop with Sirach. It runs straight through Joshua, Judges, parts of Samuel and Kings, and into certain psalms and prophetic oracles. “Hard texts” are woven through the canon that Protestants and Orthodox share.

So the real question is not, “Does Sirach have verses that land hard on our ears?” but:

• How do we read hard texts at all?

• What hermeneutic do we bring to them?

• Who gets to teach us how to hear them—our late‑modern instincts, or the Church that has prayed with these texts for centuries?

The Orthodox instinct is not to simply pretend these passages into softness, nor to discard them, but to read them:

• Within the whole canon, letting Christ, the cross, the resurrection and victorious triumph over death, and the Mother of God be the frame to understand what’s inside.

• Within the Church’s life, which has preached these texts and surrounded them with saints—male and female—who embody the right way to hear them.

• Within their own genres and settings, so we don’t flatten war narratives, prophetic oracles, and wisdom hyperbole into only wooden literalism, but see it in terms of its place in redemptive history, its multi-faceted reading by Christians in history, and its ultimate goal: the revelation of our Lord God and Savior Jesus Christ.

If we already do that for Joshua and Judges, Sirach deserves at least the same courtesy.

What Does the Verse Actually Say? Greek, Nuance, and Hyperbole

A very wooden English rendering—“Better the wickedness of a man than a woman who does good; it is woman who brings shame and disgrace”—can easily be heard as: “Men’s sins are preferable; women are fundamentally shameful.” But that’s not the only, or best, way to hear the verse.

The text could be stated like this:

“I would rather deal with any man than with the most well-intentioned woman, because a man will not disgrace you like a woman can when she acts shamefully.”

Here’s an explanation provided from an old Catholic commentary:

Hence some translate from the Greek as follows: Wickedness of a man is better than a beneficent woman; for a woman is a cause of shame and reproach. The Tigurine translation: Wickedness of a man is better than a woman showing herself kind; a woman who is the same author of disgraceful turpitude. Vatablus explains: Better, he says, that is, less evil, meaning there is more danger from the love of women, even with their kindness and charm, than from the open wickedness of men.

Thus Palacius: Better, he says, is it to associate with a wicked man than with a charming woman. For the wickedness of the former drives you away and repels you from him; but the flattery of the latter provokes and attracts you to her. Everyone hates a wicked man, but it is rare not to love a charming woman.

And Dionysius: Better, he says, is the wickedness of a man than a beneficent woman, not directly but occasionally, that is, a wicked man is less dangerous and harmful than a good woman; for a good woman provokes more to the fire of concupiscence. For the better and more charming the woman, the more desirable she is. This sense is clear from what follows: “And a woman bringing shame,” that is, leading to shameful lust and to the great disgrace that results from it. This is Dionysius.

Notice a few things:

1. The verse sits at the end of a section about fathers, daughters, and honor. In Sirach 42:9–14, the sage is lamenting how easily a daughter’s reputation (particularly in that culture) could be wrecked and how vulnerable she is in a permissive environment. He is not calmly writing “What women are like in general”; he is sounding an alarm to fathers about the stakes of raising and guarding their daughters well.

2. The Orthodox Study Bible’s gloss is pointed: “There is a subtle contrast that can easily be missed. Whereas the churlish baseness of evil male conduct can be vulgar and obscene, the flirtatious seductiveness of a woman can lead to the more serious sins of fornication or adultery.” It contrasts the gross, obvious sins of some men with the more insidious power of a woman’s seductive charm, which can lead to deeply destructive sins like fornication and adultery. In plain English: it can be far worse for a young man to be spiritually wrecked by a good‑looking disaster of a woman than to be wronged by a crude male jerk.

3. It is comparative and situational. The focus is not “all men vs. all women,” but perhaps it is a comparison between two specific scenarios:

   1. a man whose evil is crude and obvious;

   2. versus a woman who may be doing something “good” on the surface but is in fact bringing dishonor—through flirtation, infidelity, or manipulative seduction.

That is not flattering. It is not gentle. It should it be used as a justification for boys to be bad. It is also not a claim that women are ontologically inferior or more evil than men.

It is a moral warning about one particular pattern of temptation, framed in heavy hyperbole.

And we should note: Sirach is full of similarly sharp overstatements:

• “It is better to die than to beg” (Sir. 40:28).

• “A word is better than a gift” (Sir. 18:16).

We instinctively recognize these as wisdom exaggerations, we don’t take them literal commandments about charity, economics, or how to buy presents for your kids. Sirach 42:13–14 belongs to the same rhetorical world.

Women in Sirach and in Scripture More Broadly

If Sirach truly believed “woman = shame,” we would expect to see that everywhere in the book. We do not.

Sirach can speak very warmly about women:

• “A friend or companion is always welcome, but a sensible wife is better than either” (Sir. 40:21).

• “Cattle and orchards make one prosperous; but a blameless wife is accounted better than either” (Sir. 40:19, high praise in an agrarian society!).

• He stresses the importance of marriage and warns men that without a wife can become rootless wanderers (Sir. 36:29–30).

Taken as a whole, Sirach assumes that women can be wise, prudent, and a profound blessing; he simply also knows—and says aloud—that a foolish or sexually manipulative woman can do enormous damage.

And, of course, Sirach is part of a much larger biblical witness:

• The books of Ruth and Esther present heroic, faithful women at the center of God’s providence.

• Wisdom is personified as a woman in Proverbs—a theme that runs naturally into Sirach’s own love of Wisdom.

• In the fullness of time, God Himself is born of a woman, the Theotokos, whom the Church acclaims as “more honorable than the Cherubim, and beyond compare more glorious than the Seraphim.”

• The New Testament places women at the tomb as the first to meet the risen Christ, while the men are in hiding.

Whatever else we say, a truly misogynistic reading of Sirach 42:13–14 sits poorly in the scriptural and ecclesial world Sirach actually inhabits.

So What Is Sirach Really Doing Here?

Putting all this together, I would summarize the passage this way:

Sirach 42:13–14 is not teaching that women are inherently worse than men. It is warning young men—and the fathers who raise daughters—about how devastatingly powerful misused female sexuality can be, especially in a culture that treats chastity lightly. (Sounds a bit like our day.)

Combined with the broader book, it fits into a pattern: Sirach rebukes male sins directly (“stop doing this”), but he also issues “beware” warnings about certain kinds of women (and friends, as well as rulers, and so on) who can drag the young man into ruin.

For Orthodox Christians, that means we do not have to choose between embarrassed rejection and uncritical literalism. Instead, we can let this text do what wisdom literature is supposed to do: shock us awake to the seriousness of sin, the vulnerabilities of youth, and the weight of parental responsibility—while simultaneously honoring the many places in Scripture and tradition where holy women stand as icons of faithfulness and wisdom.

Where This Leaves Us

If a thoughtful Protestant says, “If I were to accept Sirach 42:13–14 as Scripture, it would have to shape how I view women,” I agree—with one key clarification: it must shape how we view certain dangers and certain responsibilities, not how we view women as such.

And then we should add: we (Christians) already say the same about Joshua, Judges, and the prophets. We do not throw out Joshua because its warfare texts can be weaponized by cultists, nor discard Judges because its horrors scandalize modern sensibilities. We accept that these hard passages belong to the Church’s Bible and work to understand them in the light of Christ.

My argument is simple: let’s extend that same hermeneutical seriousness to Sirach. Once we recognize its genre (wisdom), its primary audience (young men), its rhetorical style (hyperbole), and its place in the broader biblical witness about women, the “misogyny” charge loses most of its force. What remains is an uncomfortable but intelligible pastoral concern about sexual sin, misplaced desire, and the high stakes of fatherhood and formation.

If Sirach must be expelled from the canon for this verse, then intellectual honesty would require us to put many shared Old Testament books in the dock as well.

If, however, we are already committed to wrestling faithfully with Joshua, Judges, and the prophets as God’s Word, then Sirach 42:13–14 deserves to be read with the same disciplined charity: not explained away, but situated—within its own world, and within the larger scriptural and ecclesial world where holy women, above all the Theotokos, stand as living refutations of any truly misogynistic reading.

Author Note

If this kind of close reading of Sirach is helpful to you, I’m launching a deliberate, verse‑by‑verse walk through the entire book on Ancient Faith Radio—a year‑long series that will let us sit with the text in more detail than a single Substack piece allows. It will also connect this “bad book” to the rest of Scripture and the life of the Church in a way I can only sketch here. Keep an eye out there (and here) for more on Sirach, wisdom, and the so‑called “Apocrypha.”

1. This is an oversimplification of what “the” Septuagint even is. Check out the below conversation between Fr. Thomas Soroka and Fr. Stephen de Young on the Orthodox Old Testament and the role of the Septuagint.

2. Let’s take an example from Proverbs. Proverbs 26:4–5 deliberately puts two opposite counsels side by side so we learn that wisdom is not merely some set of fixed rules, but a discerning “it depends” judgment. Sometimes silence is the answer: “Answer not a fool according to his folly” (26:4). Other times, “Answer a fool according to his folly” (26:5, which promotes a good reductio ad absurdum) is the best choice because silence would only confirm the person in his delusion. Applying God’s wisdom always depends on the concrete person and situation before you.