XXXII Международный конгресс ИИСАА. 26–28 апреля 2023 г.

Россия и Восток. К 300-летию СПбГУ. Материалы конгресса 545 Источниковедение и историография древнего Ближнего Востока... отправителя и получателя письма, а также выявить то, какими именно способами Иру убеждает Мериранахта заступиться за него. В этом жалоба на Сабни во многом напоминает письма к мёртвым, для которых характерна сходная струк- тура, упоминания уже оказанных отправителем услуг, использование крылатых фраз и поговорок. Mescherskaya E. N. (SPbU, Saint-Petersburg) Conceptions of God in the Wisdom of Ben Sira 1 Ben Sira’s theological ideas are based on the Torah, which is, firstly, a set of laws that was given to the people of Israel by God, and, secondly, tells the story of the relationship of the chosen people with God. This implies that God and the chosen people are bound by the Covenant. Ben Sira says that it is the Torah that is the book of the Covenant of the Most High God, therefore the laws of the Torah are based on the Covenant. Good things await those who follow these laws, and bad things await those who violate them. The Torah forms the mutual obligations of the chosen people and God. For the history of religion, the originality of these relations was that the chosen people was connected by the Covenant with one, the only God. However, the Wisdom of Ben Sira as well as other literature of the Hellenistic period, complements many conceptions of the God of Israel recorded in the Torah. So, in the manuscripts that have come down to us, the author of the work does not use the proper name of God YHWH in the form of a tetragrammaton, calling Him the Most High (Hypsistos / El Elyon), my Lord (Adonai), God (Elohim), i.e. those names that were previously typical of the poetic sections of the Bible. In the Prayer (Sir 36:1–22) the author proclaims the belief in the only God, but in the spirit of his time he supplements this idea with the fact that this only God in his understanding is the God of all. He asks God to reveal his power not only to the people of Israel, but also to other nations. Sir 42:21–22 refers to the transcendence of the Jewish God, who “he is the same forever and ever. Nothing can be added to him, and nothing taken away. “God is the Creator of everything, everything that happens in the world is done by words of the Lord” (Sir 42:15). He knows everything — past, present and future, including the most secret things in the world, and sees everything, not only the deeds of men, but also their inmost thoughts (Sir 15:18, 23:19–20; 39:19–20) before they even arise. The author gives a list of some splendid manifestations of the divine creativity in Sir 43. He states that God is the Creator of the whole Universe (Sir 18: 1–14; 42: 15–43) and human life (Sir 2: 10), He “the Lord, in his wisdom” assigned every object and being his own path (Sir 33:7–14). All the works of God in the world are good and evil appears sporadically as a temporary nuisance of the creation (Sir 39:33). 1 The reported study was funded by RFBR according to the research project number 21–011–44142.