01_Biblica_1_F_Gregory_Layout 1 05/11/12 12:13 Pagina 334 334 BRADLEY C. GREGORY Remember your father and mother when you sit among the great ones Lest you forget yourself in their presence and through your habit you make a fool of yourself. Then you will wish you had not been born and the day of your birth you will curse. A person who is accustomed to words of reproach will not become disciplined as long as he lives. (23,13-15) The speech in this passage is characterized as lacking discipline and being harsh. If in v. 13a “avsurh,j” (“lewd”) is doubtful on text- critical grounds, then any kind of impious speech is included in the warning. The consequences of social shame cited by Ben Sira must be understood in light of Ben Sira’s social location among the re- tainer class that served the Jerusalem aristocracy 29. While “sitting among the great” can refer to a banquet situation (cf. 32,9) 30, it can also refer to other social or political contexts (cf. 11,1; 38,3; 39,4). Even if sinful speech has minimal negative consequences in private contexts, the habituation of speaking sinfully or harshly increases the likelihood of a slip of the tongue when the social stakes are high. Such an accidental slip seems to be what Ben Sira has in mind in v. 14c-d when he speaks of forgetting oneself and looking like a fool because of bad speech habits. As a deterrent to allowing dangerous speech habits to develop, Ben Sira reminds his students of the re- sulting anguish and the shame that would be brought upon their par- ents. For the present purposes, what is particularly important is that this kind of a slip of the tongue, which has objectionable content, results through habit 31. This comports with Ben Sira’s other state- omitted (against many commentators). The condemnation of lewd speech has no precedent in Israelite wisdom literature, but it is a significant concern among Greek writers; see J.F. HULTIN, The Ethics of Obscene Speech in Early Christianity and Its Environment (NTSup 128; Leiden 2008) 120-128. The significant currency of “avsurh,j” in Greek literature combined with its absence from both the Vetus Latina and the Syriac of 23,13 suggests that it is a sec- ondary, exegetical addition or gloss in the Greek (cf. SMEND, Die Weisheit des Jesus Sirach, 209). 29 Regarding Ben Sira’s social location see R. HORSLEY, Scribes, Visionar- ies, and the Politics of Second Temple Judea (Louisville, KY 2007) 53-70. 30 So HULTIN, Ethics of Obscene Speech, 125. 31 Elsewhere Ben Sira especially associates lying with the danger of form- ing a bad habit (7,13; 20,25), though he does not mention accidents that result from the habit.