Delight your soul and comfort your heart: Delight your soul is literally “deceive your soul”; see the comments on this same clause at 14.16. The two clauses in this line are obviously parallel, and mean essentially the same thing, but Good News Translation captures the distinction between them better than most: “Enjoy yourself and be happy.”

And remove sorrow far from you: What brings on constant sadness, or depression, is generally not so much sorrow over anything as it is worry. “Don’t be a worrier,” ben Sira says here. This is what Good News Translation means by its idiomatic “don’t worry all the time.” That doesn’t mean that it’s all right to worry some of the time. It means you just shouldn’t be the kind of person who always finds something to worry about.

For sorrow has destroyed many is rendered “and it has destroyed many people” by Good News Translation.

And there is no profit in it may be translated “and never helps anybody.”

Good News Translation reverses the last two lines of this verse, and offers a good translation.

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.