A wife’s harlotry shows in her lustful eyes: It is particularly hard to decide here whether the writer is speaking of the unfaithfulness of a wife or the immoral behavior of a woman, whether married or not. We recommend the latter interpretation with “woman.” While you can easily enough tell when a woman is flirting, ben Sira surely did not think you can tell whether a wife had been unfaithful by looking at her eyes. Besides, the next application of this principle, in the next verse, is not to wives, but to daughters. Consequently, we advise a paragraph break before this verse, rather than after it as in Good News Translation. This line is literally “The [sexual] immorality of a woman is in the fluttering of eyes.” An alternative model is “You can tell an immoral woman by the flirting look [or, the look of invitation] in her eyes,” or more broadly “You can tell if a woman wants sex by the….”

And she is known by her eyelids: The author is describing a woman flirting by raising and lowering the eyelids, winking and fluttering the eyes. This line is a close parallel to the first line. Good News Translation does well to combine the two lines, but an adjustment is necessary in its interpretation as follows:

• You can tell [or, identify] an immoral woman by the way she bats her eyes.

Or we could say:

• You can tell an immoral woman—she’s always winking and batting her eyes.

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.