The Wisdom of Jesus, Son of Sirach, and the Project of Academic Bible Translation

The article is dedicated to the experience of preparing an annotated academic translation of one of the non-canonical books of the Holy Scripture – the Wisdom of Jesus the Son of Sirach. The project was fully implemented by the Department of Biblical Studies of St. Petersburg State University with the support of the Russian Foundation for Basic Research. Following an open competition of monographs in 2023, the work was published by St. Petersburg State University Publishing House in 2024. For the first time, all known ancient Hebrew sources of the Book of Sirach were translated into Russian and published, and in more than a hundred years the book was the first annotated scientific publication. This publication describes the background to the study and the reasons that prompted the Department of Biblical Studies to organize this project. The article describes the main challenges that the team of authors faced in their work and preparation of the publication, and also explains the reasons that guided the team in choo­sing the specific form of presentation of the text and annotations.