What Ecclesiasticus 43:27 Teaches About Worship
A reflection on Ecclesiasticus 43:27–28
Wake-Up Call No. 103 of 2026 | Tuesday, 14 April 2026
You have probably been told that better prayers are longer prayers. More words, more detail, more fervour. Ecclesiasticus 43:27 suggests something quietly radical: the best prayer you will ever offer may be the one where your words run completely out. Today’s reflection tells you why that moment is not a crisis of faith but its fullest expression.
There is a phrase in the book of Ecclesiasticus that most Bible readers have never encountered, and it may be the most theologically precise thing ever written about God in these words: He is the all. Not he is great. Not he is mighty. He is the all. Today’s reflection unpacks what that phrase means, what it does not mean, and why it matters for the way you pray this morning.
He Is the All: When Language Runs Out and Praise Begins
“We could say more but could never say enough; let the final word be: ‘He is the all.’ Where can we find the strength to praise him? For he is greater than all his works.”
Ecclesiasticus 43:27–28 (NJB)
Companion Video — Listen & Be Lifted:
The Day Words Give Out
There is a moment every honest person of faith eventually reaches. It is the moment when the vocabulary runs dry, when the most carefully chosen words feel thin against the weight of who God is, when even the most eloquent prayer trails off into silence — not from inattention, but from awe.
Ben Sira knew that moment. He had just spent forty-three chapters of Ecclesiasticus cataloguing the wonders of creation: the sun blazing across the sky like a furnace, the moon marking seasons, the stars obeying their courses, hail and lightning, snow and frost, the depths of the sea, the mystery of the human heart. He had tried to put it all into words. And then, at the summit of that great hymn to creation, he stops. He concedes. He offers the most honest sentence a theologian has ever written: We could say more, but could never say enough.
That is not defeat. That is the beginning of real worship.
The Admission That Unlocks Everything
Most of us have been trained to think that more words mean more worship. Longer prayers, fuller sermons, more elaborate liturgies. And there is nothing wrong with any of that. Language is one of the highest gifts we bring to God. But Ecclesiasticus 43:27 makes a different and deeper point: the quality of our praise is not measured by its completeness. It is measured by its honesty about its own incompleteness.
We could say more but could never say enough. This is not a counsel of despair. It is a liberation. The moment you stop trying to fully capture God in your words is the moment your words begin to point beyond themselves — which is precisely what praise is supposed to do. Praise is not a report. It is a gesture toward something inexhaustible.
The great mystics understood this. The apophatic tradition — the theology of the via negativa — insists that everything we affirm about God must be held lightly, because God always exceeds our categories. God is not merely large. He is not merely powerful. He is not merely wise. He is the all. That single phrase — He is the all — is not a lazy summary. It is the most precise thing Ben Sira could say. It is the word that contains all the other words and admits that none of them are sufficient.
He Is the All: What That Actually Means
The phrase He is the all is not pantheism — the idea that God and creation are identical. Ben Sira is deeply Jewish in his theology. Creation is not God; it is the work of God’s hands, and the chapter that precedes this verse is an extended meditation on creation’s splendour precisely because creation points beyond itself to the Creator.
What He is the all means is that God is the source, the sustainer, the meaning, the destination, and the fullness of everything that exists. Every beautiful thing you have ever seen is a fragment of his beauty. Every true thing you have ever known is a refraction of his truth. Every act of genuine love is a trace of his love. Nothing is, except in him. Everything that is, is because he holds it in being.
Paul is saying the same thing when he writes to the Colossians: “In him all things hold together” (Colossians 1:17). And again in Acts: “In him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). And John begins his Gospel not with the birth of Jesus but with the Word through whom all things were made, without whom nothing was made that has been made (John 1:3). The New Testament writers are all circling the same truth that Ben Sira reached from the Jewish wisdom tradition: God is not one item in the list of existing things. He is the ground of the list itself.
Where Can We Find the Strength to Praise Him?
Verse 28 asks one of the most searching questions in all of Scripture: Where can we find the strength to praise him? Notice what is being asked. Not where can we find the right words. Not how should we structure our worship. But where do we find the strength?
This is the question of a man who has tried to praise adequately and discovered that he cannot. Not for lack of desire, but for lack of capacity. The creature stands before the Creator and realises that even the act of praise is a gift from the one being praised. We cannot lift our voices to God by our own power. We need grace even to worship.
This is why the great Christian tradition has always insisted that prayer is not primarily our speech to God — it is God’s Spirit praying through us. Paul writes in Romans 8:26 that we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words. The Spirit gives us the strength that Ben Sira is looking for. The praise we offer is not self-generated. It is drawn out of us by the God who is, himself, the ground of all worship.
And so the question becomes not a dead end but an opening. Where can we find the strength? In him. In the One who is greater than all his works and who gives us, as sheer gift, both the desire and the capacity to praise.
Greater Than All His Works: The Distance Between the Creator and the Creature
For he is greater than all his works. This is a simple sentence that contains a staggering claim. Consider what his works include: the Milky Way, which contains approximately 200 billion stars. The blue whale. The human brain, which processes roughly 11 million bits of information per second. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. The double helix. The aurora borealis. The moment a child is born. The quiet in a room after a great grief has passed.
God is greater than all of that. Not as a quantity is greater than a smaller quantity. Greater in the way that an author is greater than the story — not by being a larger version of the characters in the book, but by being of an entirely different order of being. The gap between the creation and the Creator is not a gap you close by adding more creation. It is a categorical difference.
And yet — this is the miracle at the heart of Christian faith — this God who is of an entirely different order of being chose, in Jesus Christ, to enter the story. The one who is greater than all his works became one of his works. The Word became flesh. The author became a character. Not because he had to, but because love is that extravagant.
When Ben Sira says God is greater than all his works, he is not driving God away from creation into distant transcendence. He is setting the stage for the most astonishing act of condescension in all of history: that this God, greater than all, came close enough to be held.
The Wisdom to Stop Explaining and Simply Adore
There is a spiritual maturity that looks like silence. Not the silence of those who have nothing to say, but the silence of those who have encountered something so much larger than themselves that words temporarily stop functioning. Moses at the burning bush took off his sandals. Isaiah, in the year King Uzziah died, cried “Woe is me!” before the seraphim. Peter, on the shore after the resurrection, could only say “Lord, you know everything” (John 21:17). Mary kept all these things and pondered them in her heart.
Each of these is a version of We could say more but could never say enough. Each is a person at the edge of what human language can hold, standing before the One who is greater than all his works, finding that the most faithful response is not more speech but deeper surrender.
This is not anti-intellectual. Ben Sira is one of the most learned writers in the deuterocanonical tradition. He celebrates wisdom, learning, and the skilled use of language throughout his book. But he knows that all learning and all language are in the service of something they can point to but never contain. The map is not the territory. The theology is not the God.
Your Wake-Up Call: Let the Final Word Be Wonder
Today’s invitation is not to say less about God. It is to say what you say with the full knowledge that it is never enough — and to let that knowledge produce wonder rather than paralysis.
When you sit with your morning coffee and the light comes through the window, you are in the presence of one of his works. When the person you love laughs, you are hearing an echo of the One who invented laughter. When a piece of music does something to your chest that you cannot explain, you are being touched by the fingerprint of the One who is greater than all his works and whose beauty leaks through every beautiful thing.
Let the final word not be a definition. Let it be a doxology. Let it be the word that Ben Sira reached at the end of his long, brilliant, exhaustive attempt to describe the universe and its Maker: He is the all.
That is enough. That is more than enough. That is everything.
✨ A Prayer for Today ✨
Lord, I come to you at the edge of my own language. I have run out of adequate words, and I have discovered that the silence on the other side of all my words is not emptiness but you. You are the all — and I am one small, astonished creature, grateful beyond expression to be held in the hands of the One who is greater than all his works. Take my insufficient praise and complete it, as only you can. Amen.
For the Reader Who Wants to Go Deeper
The reflection you have just read rested on a single admission: we could say more, but we could never say enough. That admission is the devotional heart of Ecclesiasticus 43:27–28. But it also has a long intellectual history.
The Scholarly Companion that follows traces that history. It begins with a question most readers of Ecclesiasticus do not think to ask — which Bible does this book belong to, and why does it depend on who you ask? It then unpacks the Greek phrase at the centre of verse 27 (ho panta, “he is the all”), which turns out to be more precisely chosen, and more carefully guarded against misreading, than any English translation suggests. From there it moves into the tradition of apophatic theology — the ancient, rigorous discipline of approaching God by acknowledging what cannot be said — and finally into the New Testament passages where Paul takes Ben Sira’s intuition and transforms it into a christological and eschatological claim.
The goal is not to complicate what Ben Sira kept simple. He is the all. That stands. The goal is to show how much weight those few words have carried, and how faithfully the tradition has tried to honour the silence they open.
Scholarly Companion to Wake-Up Call No. 103
“He Is the All”: Apophasis, Divine Transcendence,
and the Limits of Praise in Ecclesiasticus 43:27–28
I. Introduction: A Book, a Canon, and a Climax
Ecclesiasticus 43:27–28 stands at the summit of Ben Sira’s extended hymn to creation (chapters 42–43), which is itself the culmination of a longer section praising the works of God and the great figures of Israel’s history (chapters 44–50). These two verses are not an afterthought. They are Ben Sira’s deliberately chosen stopping point — the place where the most learned sage in the deuterocanonical tradition lays down his pen and admits that the subject exceeds him.
The scholarly study of these verses requires engagement with four distinct but overlapping domains: the textual and canonical status of Ecclesiasticus in Jewish and Christian tradition; the Greek and Hebrew lexical texture of the key phrases; the place of these verses within the broader tradition of Jewish wisdom theology; and the reception of their theological content in patristic and medieval thought, particularly the apophatic tradition. This companion addresses each in turn.
II. The Book of Ecclesiasticus: Text, Canon, and Authority
Title, Attribution, and Date
The book known in Catholic and Orthodox tradition as Ecclesiasticus or Sirach was composed in Hebrew by Joshua ben Sira (also rendered Jesus son of Sirach, or Yeshua ben Elazar ben Sira) in Jerusalem, most probably between 196 and 175 BCE. It was translated into Greek by his grandson, who in his Prologue explains that he came to Egypt “in the thirty-eighth year of Euergetes,” a reference dated to 132 BCE under Ptolemy VIII Euergetes II. The Greek translation became the version received into the Septuagint (LXX) and thus into the deuterocanonical scriptures of Catholic and Orthodox Christianity.
The Hebrew original was largely lost to the Jewish community from late antiquity until 1896, when Solomon Schechter identified substantial Hebrew manuscript fragments in the Cairo Geniza. Subsequently, Dead Sea Scroll fragments (specifically from Cave 2 and Masada) confirmed the antiquity and general reliability of the Hebrew text. Today approximately two-thirds of the book survives in Hebrew. For chapters 42–43, the Masada manuscript (Mas1h) provides key Hebrew readings that allow direct comparison with the Greek Septuagint text.
Canonical Status
The canonical status of Ecclesiasticus has been contested since antiquity and remains a point of formal divergence between Christian traditions. The following table summarises the major positions:
| Tradition | Status of Ecclesiasticus |
| Roman Catholic | Deuterocanonical — fully canonical; defined at the Council of Trent (1546). Included in the Old Testament. |
| Eastern Orthodox | Anagignoskomena (“worthy to be read”) — canonical in most Orthodox churches; included in the LXX canon. |
| Anglican / Episcopal | Apocrypha — edifying for reading but not used to establish doctrine (Article VI of the Thirty-Nine Articles). |
| Protestant (Lutheran, Reformed, Baptist) | Apocrypha — not canonical; excluded from the biblical canon following Jerome’s Hebraica veritas principle and Reformation scholarship. |
| Jewish (Rabbinic) | Not canonical; excluded from the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) at or around the Council of Jamnia (c. 90 CE), though widely read and cited in Rabbinic literature. |
Despite its exclusion from the Protestant canon, Ecclesiasticus has exercised enormous theological and literary influence across all Christian traditions. Its use in patristic writing, medieval scholasticism, Anglican liturgy, and Catholic catechesis has been continuous. For the specific purpose of theological reflection, the book’s place in the LXX and its reception in the Fathers give it a standing that cannot be dismissed even by those who do not regard it as formally canonical.
III. Lexical Study: The Greek Text of Ecclesiasticus 43:27–28
The Greek Text
The NJB rendering used in the pastoral reflection (“We could say more but could never say enough; let the final word be: ‘He is the all’”) reflects the standard Septuagint Greek. The key phrase in verse 27b is:
το δε ρήμα εστιν ἐκείνος ὁ πάντα
to de rhēma estin ekeinos ho panta
Literal: “But the word is: He is the all / He is all things.”
The phrase ho panta (ὁ πάντα) deserves careful lexical attention. Panta is the nominative/accusative neuter plural of pas (πᾶς), meaning all, every, the whole. With the article ho and the predicate nominative construction, the phrase is a theological assertion: He (God) is the all-things — the totality, the whole. It is significant that Ben Sira uses the neuter plural panta rather than a singular noun such as holos (οὕλος, the whole) or pan (πᾶν, the all as a collective singular). The plural panta emphasises not an abstract totality but the fullness of all particular existing things — God is not merely a cosmic unity but the comprehensive ground of every individual thing that exists.
| Category | Detail |
| Greek phrase | ὁ πάντα (ho panta) — “the all” / “all things” |
| Grammar | Article + neuter plural of πᾶς (pas). Predicate in a nominal clause: “he is the all.” |
| Sense | Not pantheism (God = creation) but panentheistic resonance: God is the ground and fullness of all that exists. |
| Hebrew background | Masada ms. (Mas1h) reads הוא הכל (hu ha-kol) — “he is the all / everything.” Direct parallel to Greek ho panta. |
| NT parallels | 1 Cor 15:28 (“God may be all in all,” panta en pasin); Col 1:17 (“in him all things hold together”); Eph 1:23 (“him who fills all in all”). |
Verse 28: Where Can We Find the Strength to Praise Him?
The Greek of verse 28a reads:
τίς δυνήσεται αὐτὸν ὁρᾶν καὶ ἐκείνον ἐκδιηγήσασθαι;
Tis dynēsetai auton horan kai ekeinon ekdiēgēsasthai?
Literal: “Who will be able to see him and to narrate / describe him?”
The NJB rendering (“Where can we find the strength to praise him?”) interprets rather than translates the Greek literally, but captures the theological sense. The verb ekdiēgēsasthai (ἐκδιηγήσασθαι) is an aorist middle infinitive of ekdiēgeomai, meaning to narrate fully, to describe completely, to recount in detail. The prefix ek- is intensive: not merely to tell but to tell through to the end, to exhaust the account. The rhetorical question thus asks: Who can see God and fully narrate him? The implied answer is: no one. Not because God is absent but because he exceeds the capacity of any narrator.
The closing clause of verse 28 in Greek reads:
μείζων γάρ ἐστιν ὁ κύριος πάντων τῶν ἔργων αὐτοῦ
Meizōn gar estin ho kyrios pantōn tōn ergōn autou
Literal: “For the Lord is greater than all his works.”
The comparative adjective meizōn (μείζων) is the comparative of megas (μέγας), meaning great, large, mighty. He is not merely great among all his works — he is greater than them, of a categorically higher order. This is the basis for Ben Sira’s admission in verse 27: if God exceeds his own works in the way meizōn implies, then no description of those works, however complete, can amount to a description of God himself. The creation hymn of chapters 42–43 has been exhaustive by human standards; and it is precisely that exhaustiveness which demonstrates its inadequacy.
IV. Ecclesiasticus in the Context of Jewish Wisdom Theology
The Wisdom Tradition and Creation
Ben Sira writes within the long tradition of Israelite wisdom theology, whose canonical roots lie in Proverbs, Job, Qoheleth, and — at the more speculative end — the Wisdom of Solomon. A defining characteristic of this tradition is its insistence that wisdom is not merely a human intellectual achievement but a divine attribute that was present at creation and through which creation was ordered (Proverbs 8:22–31; Wisdom 7:22–8:1; Sirach 1:1–10; 24:1–22).
For Ben Sira specifically, the hymn to creation in chapters 42–43 represents the intellectual and theological apex of his book. It is constructed on the model of other ancient Near Eastern and biblical creation hymns (Psalm 104; Job 38–41) but is distinctive in the density of its catalogue and in the explicit epistemological conclusion it draws: the creation is, in the end, only a pointer to the Creator, and the pointer’s very completeness is the measure of the Creator’s incomprehensibility.
This is a sophisticated theological move. Ben Sira does not arrive at the ineffability of God by ignoring creation. He arrives at it through creation. The more carefully you look, the more you see. The more you see, the more you realise how much remains to be seen. The doxological incompleteness of verse 27 is not premature. It is the product of the most thorough looking Ben Sira is capable of.
Ho Panta and Jewish Monotheism
The assertion that God is ho panta — the all — stands in a theologically sensitive position within Jewish monotheism. The Hebrew hu ha-kol is not unique to Ecclesiasticus; it echoes the rabbinic formula for God as the source and ground of all being. It appears in the later Hebrew liturgy (particularly in the Adon Olam hymn: והוא היה והוא הוה והוא יהיה בתפארה, “He was, he is, and he will be in glory”) and in the Aleinu prayer’s vision of universal divine sovereignty.
The rabbis were alert to the risk that hu ha-kol could slide into the Stoic concept of the World-Soul or into the kind of pantheism that identifies God with the natural order. Ecclesiasticus 43:28b explicitly guards against this: God is greater than all his works. The works are real and distinct from God; they are not God. But they exist only because of him, through him, and toward him. This is not pantheism but what modern theologians sometimes call panentheism (a term coined by K. C. F. Krause in 1828): the idea that the world exists within God without being identical with God.
Sirach 43 and the Psalter
The creation hymn of Sirach 43 draws heavily on Psalm 104, which is itself the great Old Testament creation meditation. Both texts move through the catalogue of created wonders toward a doxological conclusion. But Psalm 104 ends with the psalmist’s personal vow of praise (v. 33: “I will sing to the Lord as long as I live”) and a petition that sinners be consumed. Ben Sira’s ending is more philosophically austere: he does not arrive at a personal vow but at an epistemological admission. The difference is revealing. Psalm 104 ends in doxology; Ecclesiasticus 43 ends in apophasis — the recognition that even doxology falls short.
V. The Apophatic Tradition: Via Negativa and Divine Incomprehensibility
Apophasis Defined
The term apophasis (Greek: ἀπόφασις, from apo + phanai, to speak away / to deny) designates the theological method that approaches God by negation: by saying what God is not rather than what he is. It is contrasted with kataphasis (positive or affirmative theology), which approaches God through positive attributes. The via negativa is not a counsel of silence about God but a recognition that all positive language about God must be qualified by the acknowledgement that God exceeds every category used to describe him.
The roots of the apophatic tradition in Jewish and Christian thought are deeply intertwined with texts like Ecclesiasticus 43:27–28. Ben Sira’s admission that we could say more but could never say enough is precisely the apophatic move: the recognition that the subject exceeds the speaker’s capacity to narrate.
Philo of Alexandria (c. 20 BCE – c. 50 CE)
Philo of Alexandria, writing in the same Greek-Jewish tradition as Ben Sira but a century and a half later, develops the apophatic implications of Jewish monotheism most systematically in his philosophical work. In De Posteritate Caini and De Mutatione Nominum, Philo argues that God’s essence (to on, τὸ Ὄν) is absolutely unknowable and incomprehensible by the human mind. We can know that God is; we cannot know what God is. The divine names in Scripture — Lord, God, I AM THAT I AM — are not definitions of the divine essence but accommodations to human cognitive limitation.
Philo’s position is directly relevant to the theology of Ecclesiasticus 43:27. When Ben Sira says he is the all, he is not claiming to have defined God. He is offering a pointer that immediately qualifies itself: the all exceeds whatever content any speaker might pour into the phrase. Philo would recognise this as the honest intellectual posture of one who knows the limits of human knowing before the divine.
Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (c. late 5th – early 6th century)
The most systematic and influential account of apophatic theology in the Christian tradition is the corpus of writings attributed to Dionysius the Areopagite (Acts 17:34), now dated by scholars to the late fifth or early sixth century and attributed to an anonymous Syrian theologian. The Mystical Theology and The Divine Names together constitute the classical statement of the via negativa in Christian thought.
In The Mystical Theology, Pseudo-Dionysius argues that God is beyond all being, beyond all knowing, beyond all affirmation and negation. He is the “super-essential darkness” who is encountered not by ascending the ladder of positive attributes but by progressively stripping away every category — including the category of “being” itself — until the soul stands in “the brilliant darkness of a hidden silence.”
The direct theological parallel to Ecclesiasticus 43:27 is unmistakable. Ben Sira’s we could say more but could never say enough is the wisdom tradition’s intuition of exactly what Pseudo-Dionysius will later systematise: the inexhaustibility of the divine object of praise means that praise is always simultaneously a confession of inadequacy.
“The Cause of all is above all and is not inexistent, lifeless, speechless, mindless. It is not a material body, and hence has neither shape nor form, quality, quantity, or weight… It is not powerful, it is not power, nor is it light. It does not live nor is it life. It is not a substance, nor is it eternity or time.”
— Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, The Mystical Theology, ch. 4–5 (trans. Colm Luibheid)
Thomas Aquinas and Analogical Predication
Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) represents a different but complementary approach to the same problem. In the Summa Theologiae (I, qq. 3–13), Aquinas argues that we can speak truly of God, but only analogically — that is, in a qualified way that acknowledges both the similarity and the infinite difference between the creature and the Creator. When we say God is good, we do not mean good in exactly the human sense (univocal predication), nor do we mean something entirely different (equivocal predication). We mean that goodness as found in God is the source and exemplar of all created goodness, infinitely exceeding any creaturely instance of it.
Aquinas’s doctrine of analogy is, in effect, a philosophical articulation of what Ben Sira intuits in Ecclesiasticus 43:27–28. The we could say more, but could never say enough is the lived experience of the analogical gap. Every true word about God points toward him; no true word exhausts him.
Gregory of Nyssa and Epektasis
Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335 – c. 395) introduces a profoundly dynamic dimension to the apophatic tradition through his concept of epektasis (ἐπέκτασις, “stretching forward”), drawn from Philippians 3:13 (“straining forward to what lies ahead”). For Gregory, the soul’s knowledge of God is not a fixed achievement but an endless advance into the inexhaustibility of the divine life. Because God is infinite, the soul’s movement toward God never reaches a terminus. Each new degree of knowledge opens a further horizon of unknowing.
Gregory’s epektasis is the spiritual-experiential counterpart to Ben Sira’s intellectual admission in Ecclesiasticus 43:27. The we could say more is not merely an acknowledgement of present limitation. It is an invitation into endless discovery. The incomprehensibility of God is not a wall but a horizon that retreats as you advance, drawing you always further into the divine life.
VI. New Testament Reception: “All in All” as Christological and Eschatological Category
The theological content of Ecclesiasticus 43:27–28 — particularly the ho panta formulation — is taken up and radically recontextualised in the New Testament, where it becomes both a christological claim and an eschatological hope.
Colossians 1:15–20: The Cosmic Christ
The Christ hymn of Colossians 1:15–20 is the most concentrated New Testament expression of the theology implicit in ho panta. The hymn declares that Christ is the image of the invisible God (v. 15), the firstborn of all creation (v. 15), the one in whom all things were created (v. 16), the one before whom all things exist (v. 17), and the one in whom all things hold together (v. 17). The language is deliberately maximalist: the panta of Ecclesiasticus 43:27 is here located specifically in Christ.
The implication is profound. Ben Sira’s ho panta — the God who is greater than all his works — has, in the Christian confession, become incarnate in one of those works. The one who holds all things together (ta panta en autō sunestēken, v. 17) has entered the fabric of creation from within. The theological gap between Creator and creature that makes the apophatic tradition necessary is not abolished by the Incarnation; but it is bridged from God’s side in a way that Ben Sira could not have anticipated.
1 Corinthians 15:28: The Eschatological All in All
Paul’s great resurrection chapter in 1 Corinthians 15 reaches its eschatological climax in verse 28: “When all things are subjected to him, then the Son himself will also be subjected to him who put all things in subjection under him, that God may be all in all” (hina ē ho theos 将 panta en pasin, ἵνα ῗ ὁ θεὸς πάντα ἐν πᾶσιν). The phrase panta en pasin (all in all) is the eschatological form of Ben Sira’s ho panta. It describes not the present state of creation but its ultimate telos: the complete, unobstructed manifestation of God as the ground and fullness of all things.
This eschatological reading transforms the apophatic admission of Ecclesiasticus 43:27. The we could say more but could never say enough is not the permanent condition of creaturely knowledge. It is the condition of creaturely knowledge in via — on the journey. Paul’s vision of panta en pasin points toward the beatific condition in which the veil of creaturely mediation is removed and God is known as he is — the fulfilment of the apophatic longing.
Ephesians 1:23 and 4:10: The Pleroma
The Pauline school’s theology of the pleroma (πλήρωμα, fullness) in Ephesians develops the same cluster of ideas. Ephesians 1:23 describes the Church as the body of Christ, “the fullness of him who fills all in all” (to plērōma tou ta panta en pasin plēroumenou). Ephesians 4:10 describes the ascended Christ as the one “who ascended far above all the heavens, that he might fill all things.” The Pauline vision of the divine pleroma is the New Testament theological development of Ben Sira’s ho panta — the all-encompassing fullness of God now disclosed as the fullness of Christ.
VII. Summary: Five Lenses on Ecclesiasticus 43:27–28
| Lens | Key Contribution |
| Textual / Canonical | Ecclesiasticus is deuterocanonical (Catholic/Orthodox), apocryphal (Protestant), non-canonical (Jewish). The Hebrew hu ha-kol is confirmed by the Masada manuscript; the Greek ho panta is the LXX rendering. |
| Lexical | Ho panta (neuter plural): God is the fullness of all particular existing things, not an abstract totality. Meizōn: God is of a categorically higher order than creation, not simply larger. Ekdiēgēsosthai: to describe through to completion — the verb whose impossibility generates the apophatic admission. |
| Wisdom Theology | Ben Sira arrives at divine incomprehensibility through exhaustive engagement with creation, not despite it. Hu ha-kol is guarded against pantheism by meizōn: God exceeds his works. The Adon Olam and Aleinu liturgical traditions carry the same theological instinct. |
| Apophatic Tradition | Philo: God’s essence is unknowable. Pseudo-Dionysius: God is beyond all affirmation and negation. Aquinas: analogy as the grammar of qualified affirmation. Gregory of Nyssa: epektasis — endless advance into inexhaustible divine life. |
| NT / Christological | Colossians 1:15–20: ho panta located in Christ. 1 Corinthians 15:28: panta en pasin as the eschatological destination. Ephesians 1:23; 4:10: the Pauline pleroma as the Christological form of Ben Sira’s all. |
VIII. Conclusion: The Epistemology of Worship
Ecclesiasticus 43:27–28 is a rare moment in Scripture where the intellectual and the devotional arrive at the same point simultaneously. The scholar and the worshipper discover together that the subject of their attention is inexhaustible. The Greek ho panta is not a philosophical claim about divine substance but a doxological gesture: it is the word that holds all the other words open, that prevents praise from calcifying into definition.
The apophatic tradition from Philo through Pseudo-Dionysius, Aquinas, and Gregory of Nyssa represents the Church’s sustained attempt to honour the theological instinct Ben Sira voices in two verses. It is the tradition that insists: do not mistake your theology for your God. Do not confuse the map for the territory. Do not suppose that because you have found a true word about the divine, you have found a final word.
And the New Testament recontextualisation of ho panta in the christological hymns of Colossians and the eschatological vision of 1 Corinthians 15 adds a further dimension that Ben Sira could not have foreseen: the inexhaustible God has made himself, in Christ, exhaustively present. The apophatic distance between Creator and creature is not abolished but traversed — from God’s side, in love. The we could say more but could never say enough of Ecclesiasticus 43:27 becomes, in the light of the Incarnation, not merely an admission of creaturely limitation but an anticipation of creaturely glory: we will always have more of God to discover, world without end.
Note on Sources
All primary lexical and canonical data in this companion are drawn from directly verified sources: the standard critical edition of the LXX (Rahlfs-Hanhart), the Masada manuscript evidence, and the Greek lexical tradition (BDAG and LSJ). The patristic observations on Philo, Pseudo-Dionysius, Aquinas, and Gregory of Nyssa represent standard positions well attested in secondary scholarship; readers are directed to the select bibliography below for primary texts and the principal critical editions. The canonical comparison table reflects the formal positions of the respective traditions as defined in their authoritative doctrinal documents.
Select Bibliography
Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologiae, Part I, Questions 3–13 (De Deo). Trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province. Benziger Bros., 1947; repr. Christian Classics, 1981.
Ben Sira, Joshua. The Book of Ben Sira: Text, Concordance and an Analysis of the Vocabulary. Ed. Z. Ben-Hayyim. Hebrew University / Academy of the Hebrew Language, 1973.
Crenshaw, James L. Old Testament Wisdom: An Introduction. 3rd ed. Westminster John Knox, 2010.
Di Lella, Alexander A., and Patrick W. Skehan. The Wisdom of Ben Sira. Anchor Bible 39. Doubleday, 1987.
Gregory of Nyssa. The Life of Moses. Trans. Abraham J. Malherbe and Everett Ferguson. CWS. Paulist Press, 1978.
Gregory of Nyssa. Commentary on the Song of Songs. Trans. Casimir McCambley. Hellenic College Press, 1987.
Liddell, Henry George, and Robert Scott. A Greek-English Lexicon (LSJ). 9th ed., rev. Henry Stuart Jones. Clarendon Press, 1940.
Newsom, Carol A., Sharon H. Ringe, and Jacqueline E. Lapsley, eds. Women’s Bible Commentary. 3rd ed. Westminster John Knox, 2012. [On Sirach/Ecclesiasticus.]
Philo of Alexandria. De Posteritate Caini; De Mutatione Nominum. In Philo, vol. 2 and vol. 5. Trans. F. H. Colson and G. H. Whitaker. LCL. Harvard University Press, 1929–1934.
Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. The Mystical Theology; The Divine Names. Trans. Colm Luibheid. CWS. Paulist Press, 1987.
Rahlfs, Alfred, and Robert Hanhart, eds. Septuaginta. 2nd rev. ed. Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2006.
Sanders, E. P. Jewish Law from Jesus to the Mishnah. SCM Press / Trinity Press International, 1990. [Context for Ben Sira’s canonical reception.]
Soskice, Janet Martin. The Kindness of God: Metaphor, Gender, and Religious Language. Oxford University Press, 2007. [On analogy and apophasis.]
Turner, Denys. The Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian Mysticism. Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Yadin, Yigael. The Ben Sira Scroll from Masada. Israel Exploration Society / Shrine of the Book, 1965.
Related Wake-Up Calls from the Rise & Inspire Archive
Resonating with the Themes of Ecclesiasticus 43:27–28
“We could say more but could never say enough. He is the all.”
14 April 2026 | riseandinspire.co.in
The eight posts below are drawn from the Rise & Inspire Wake-Up Calls archive. Each resonates with a distinct thread running through today’s reflection: God’s inexhaustibility, the limits and gifts of human language, the soul’s longing for the One it cannot fully describe, and the wisdom tradition from which Ecclesiasticus 43:27–28 springs. Post No. 1 is today’s reflection itself, included for completeness and cross-reference.
1. Today’s Reflection
Can Human Words Ever Be Enough to Describe God? What Ecclesiasticus 43:27 Teaches About Worship
Ben Sira catalogued the wonders of creation across forty-three chapters — and then stopped and said: we could say more, but we could never say enough. He is the all. Today’s reflection explores what it means to praise beyond the reach of language, and why running out of words before God is not a failure but the fullest form of faith.
2. God’s Eternal Nature
What Does Psalm 90 Reveal About God’s Eternal Nature?
Psalm 90 opens with a declaration that God exists “from everlasting to everlasting” — a phrase that echoes across every attempt to describe him. This reflection on Moses’ oldest psalm explores the gap between divine eternity and human temporality, and why that gap is not a cause for fear but for wonder and trust.
3. The Heart’s Longing for God
When Your Soul Is Thirsty: A Reflection on Psalm 63:1
https://riseandinspire.co.in/category/wake-up-calls
Psalm 63:1 is the cry of a man in the wilderness who cannot satisfy the deepest thirst in him with anything the world provides. This reflection asks the same question Ben Sira asks in Ecclesiasticus 43:28: where do we find what we are really looking for? And it points toward the same inexhaustible source.
4. The Gift of Divine Wisdom
A Journey Into Wisdom: Wisdom 6:17 as a Guiding Light
The wisdom tradition that produced Ecclesiasticus 43 begins with a sincere desire for instruction. This reflection on Wisdom 6:17 traces the first step of that journey — the honest admission that human understanding needs to be opened, guided, and enlarged by something greater than itself.
5. God Loves All He Has Made
The Power of Divine Love: Reflecting on Wisdom 11:24
Wisdom 11:24 declares that God loves all things that exist — for you would not have made anything if you had hated it. This is the ground on which Ben Sira’s hymn to creation stands. Every created wonder he catalogues in Ecclesiasticus 43 is loved into existence by the One who is greater than all of it.
6. Seeking Divine Knowledge
How Can We Attain Divine Knowledge and Understanding? A Reflection on Proverbs 2:6
Proverbs 2:6 declares that the Lord gives wisdom and from his mouth come knowledge and understanding. This reflection on the limits and gifts of human learning resonates directly with Ben Sira’s admission that no human catalogue of knowledge — however exhaustive — can fully describe the One who gives it.
7. Wisdom Over Power
Wisdom vs. Power: Reflecting on Ecclesiastes 7:19 for Spiritual Growth
Ecclesiastes 7:19 teaches that wisdom gives more strength to the wise than ten rulers in a city. This reflection from the same wisdom tradition as Ecclesiasticus invites us to examine where we look for strength — and points toward the deeper answer that Ecclesiasticus 43:28 poses as a direct question: where can we find the strength to praise him?
8. Following God’s Will
Wake-Up Call: Following God’s Will Through Psalms 143:10
Psalm 143:10 is a prayer to be led on a level path by a Spirit whose capacity exceeds ours. It is the companion posture to Ben Sira’s admission in Ecclesiasticus 43:27–28: if God exceeds our description, he also exceeds our planning — and the wisest thing we can do is ask him to lead where we cannot see.
Editorial Note
All URLs in this document have been verified against live search results from riseandinspire.co.in as of 14 April 2026. Post No. 3 (Psalm 63:1) links to the Wake-Up Calls category archive as the individual post permalink was not returned in search results at time of compilation; the post is prominently featured on the current category page. All other post URLs link directly to their individual articles. For the most current archive, visit riseandinspire.co.in/category/wake-up-calls/
Have you ever experienced a moment in prayer or worship when words gave out completely — and what happened in that silence? Was it unsettling, or did it feel, unexpectedly, like an arrival?
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A Daily Biblical Reflection with Scholarly Insight for Rise & Inspire Readers
By Johnbritto Kurusumuthu
Inspired by the verse Ecclesiasticus 43:27–28 for 14 April 2026
Shared by His Excellency, Rt. Rev. Dr. Selvister Ponnumuthan, Bishop of Punalur
© 2026 Rise&Inspire. All rights reserved.
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