He will make room for every act of mercy: This means that every act of mercy is accounted for in God’s judgment. We may say “The Lord will overlook no act of kindness” or “The Lord remembers every kind deed that people do.” Here Good News Translation reads the Hebrew; we recommend following the Greek text, as in Revised Standard Version.

Every one will receive in accordance with his deeds: Good News Translation provides a clear and useful model here, but we may also say “and he [the Lord] gives everyone what they deserve.”

Some manuscripts add verses 15-16. They should be included in a footnote at the end of verse 14 (so Revised Standard Version, Good News Translation).

The Lord hardened Pharaoh so that he did not know him: Pharaoh was the traditional title of “the king of Egypt” (Good News Translation, Contemporary English Version). It was not the name of a king. New English Bible offers a better model than Good News Translation for this line with “The Lord made Pharaoh too stubborn to acknowledge him.” An even better rendering is “The Lord made the king of Egypt too stubborn to admit that the Lord is God.”

In order that his works might be known under heaven means “so that people [on earth] might know the Lord’s deeds.” This line does not seem to follow from the first one, and it is hard to understand what the writer had in mind. Probably it was something like this: God intended to rescue the Israelites, and wanted the world to know about it, so in order to bring this about, he made the king stubborn, so that he could rescue the Israelites and thus show his power. It is doubtful that any translation can make this perfectly clear, but it may help to translate this line as a separate sentence, and it may also help to expand his works into a verbal phrase as follows:

• The Lord did this so that the world would someday learn about what he was going to do.

The relative clause “what he was going to do” is put into the future since the Lord’s rescue of the Israelites was still future at the time he made the king stubborn. The word “someday” is inserted to keep it from sounding like the world was going to learn about what the Lord was going to do before he did it.

The two lines of verse 15 present pronoun problems. Translators should be sure that any pronouns used will be easily and correctly understood. His works refers to the Lord’s works, not Pharaoh’s.

His mercy is manifest to the whole of creation: Good News Translation provides a good model here, but we could also say “All creation knows his mercy” or “He [the Lord] shows his mercy to everything he has created.”

And he divided his light and darkness with a plumb line: This is a literal translation of the Greek, but it makes little sense. With a plumb line is almost surely a scribal error. The Hebrew text is uncertain. It reads “He has assigned his light and his praise to human beings,” but scholars, with good reason, are convinced “his light and his praise” should read “his light and his darkness.” The meaning of this line is not clear, but we assume it echoes the meaning of verse 14b, so we suggest Contemporary English Version as a model: “so he separated those who have his light from those who remain in darkness.”

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.