My soul takes pleasure in three things: My soul is here a poetic equivalent for the first person pronoun “I.” Translators may use this pronoun and still find a way to give the line a nice extra touch. Good News Translation, for instance, speaks of “special delight.” The Greek simply says “three” here; it does not say three things, which is a bit awkward, since the three things are actually people. For the whole line New English Bible says “There are three sights which warm my heart.” It thinks of ben Sira taking pleasure when he happens to see any of the three types of people whom he describes in this verse. It works well in English, and fits in with the next line. For three things, we may say “three kinds of people”; this is close to what the Greek says in the first line of verse 2, and we could easily bring it forward to this point. (It is literally what Good News Translation and New Revised Standard Version have there and close to what others have, but it is not a literal translation of the Greek). So an alternate rendering for this line is “There are three kinds of people who make me happy.”
And they are beautiful in the sight of the Lord and of men: These three kinds of people are not only a delight to ben Sira’s heart; everyone finds them a delight—and so does the Lord. Contemporary English Version has “and are beautiful to the Lord and to humans.” But we may also translate “and the Lord and humans consider them beautiful.”
As the footnotes in both Revised Standard Version and Good News Translation indicate, their first two lines are not translations of the Greek, which reads: “In three [ways] I was made beautiful and I stood in beauty before the Lord and men.” This reading makes Wisdom the speaker, rather than ben Sira. Most scholars are convinced that the Syriac and Latin versions preserve the true sense of these lines, and we recommend that translators follow Revised Standard Version and Good News Translation here. A footnote is called for, and Good News Translation‘s note provides a good model:
Some ancient translations There are … alike; Greek I was made beautiful in three ways and I stood before the Lord and people in beauty.
The three things mentioned in the first two lines of this verse are now named. Translators will want to find some way of presenting the three things on the printed page in such a way that they are visible to the eye as three clearly distinctive items. Good News Translation uses a stair-step indentation to do this.
Agreement between brothers: The idea in the Greek word for agreement is that the brothers are of “the same mind.” Good News Translation “get along with each other” is an English idiom for having a pleasant relationship; it does not necessarily mean that the brothers live with each other or even near each other. They just do not have bad disagreements.
Friendship between neighbors: This line covers friendly relations among people who are not members of the same family.
And a wife and husband who live in harmony: As is usual in numerical proverbs, the most striking example is saved at the end. Good News Translation translates this well; in fact, the whole list of the three items has a nice warmth in Good News Translation that fits the subject matter.
Quoted with permission from Bullard, Roger A. and Hatton, Howard A. A Handbook on Sirach. (UBS Helps for Translators). New York: UBS, 2008. For this and other handbooks for translators see here.