You will devour your leaves and destroy your fruit, and will be left like a withered tree: This literally translated sentence presents a peculiar picture: a person is compared to a tree that eats its own leaves and fruit. New Revised Standard Version uses the passive voice: “Your leaves will be devoured and your fruit destroyed….” New English Bible, with some slight textual backing, uses the third person: “they [violent passions] will eat up your leaves, destroy your fruit, and leave you a withered tree.” Good News Translation avoids the problem by saying “You will be left like a dead tree without any leaves or fruit.” Contemporary English Version is similar with:

• and you will be left to wither,
like a tree with burned leaves
and scorched fruit.

A word should be said in defense of the literal figure (although the translator may very well choose not to use it). In English there is an idiom “to eat yourself up,” and a person can do this with anger or jealousy or regret. It describes a strong but self-destructive emotion. This is what ben Sira is portraying. It fits in with verse 2 (insofar as we can understand verse 2). In the Old Testament a fruitless tree can represent a childless person, but here it probably represents a picture of desolation—something that has been destroyed. The image of the withered tree is also found in Isa 56.3 and Ezek 17.24.

An alternative model for this verse is:

• You will destroy yourself [or, eat away at yourself] until you are like a bare tree—no leaves, no fruit, just dead wood.

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.