Do not meddle in what is beyond your tasks: Good News Translation connects this line to the previous verse, making it the conclusion to the previous sentence. This enables Good News Translation to reduce what is beyond your tasks to “them.” That is a bit too much. Even “concern yourself” is a bit colorless. Meddle is better. Paul uses the Greek verb rendered meddle to startling effect in 2 Thes 3.11, where he describes certain people as doing no “work,” but being “mere busybodies.” “Work” renders the verb in its root form, but in the compound form used here it means “to be a busybody, to be meddlesome.” The Greek text of Sirach makes the same contrast between your tasks (“works”) and being meddlesome. The meaning of meddle is expressed in colloquial English as “mess [or, monkey around] with.” The author is saying “Don’t go monkeying around with things that are none of your business.” Translators should have no difficulty finding idiomatic expressions in their own languages that mean “to meddle in someone else’s business.”

For matters too great for human understanding have been shown you: Good News Translation‘s introductory “After all” places this line in good perspective. The author is telling us that we have more than we can ever handle with what the Lord has revealed, so why examine things he didn’t see fit to reveal? Another approach for this line is “After all, what God has told us about is more than we humans can ever understand.”

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.