The book of Ecclesiasticus, or “The Wisdom of Jesus the son of Sirach,” is one of the Apochrypha. It was written by Joshua ben Sira ben Eliezer, a priest, at Jerusalem, about two hundred years before the coming of Christ. “The original Hebrew, with the exception of a few fragments in the Gemaras and Midrashim, is no longer extant, but we have translations in Greek, Syriac, and Arabic. The work has been always held in high esteem, by both Jews and Christians, and was judged by some of the Talmudists to be worthy of a place among the canonical Scriptures.”[31] In this work, the priestly author has written this proverb, “He that is baptized from the dead, and again toucheth the dead, what availeth his washing?”—Ecclus. xxxi, 30 (xxxiv, 25 of the English version). Here, it is unquestionable that reference is had to the cleansing of those who were defiled by the dead. Such persons were “baptized from the dead,” that is, purged from the defilement, incurred through the touch of the dead, by the sprinkling of the water of separation. It has been said, by Baptist writers, that the author of the proverb meant to designate the self-washing which was required of those who had been thus sprinkled. But, in the first place, we must again repeat it, the self-washings were not immersions. In the second, they were not the purification from the dead. On that point, the law was express. “The man that shall be unclean, and shall not purify himself, that soul shall be cut off from among the congregation, because he hath defiled the sanctuary of the Lord: _the water of separation_ hath not been _sprinkled_ upon him; he is unclean.”—Num. xix, 20. The self-washings are never called purifyings, nor alluded to by that name. Besides, as before remarked, on another point, the pre-eminence thus assigned to those washings, as compared with the sprinklings, is contrary to the whole spirit and tenor of the law, and would imply a preference given to our own righteousness, which the former symbolized, over the blood of sprinkling of the Lord Jesus, and his renewing Spirit, typified by the latter. Moreover, upon this view, we are to suppose that the author of the proverb, himself a priest, ignored that official sprinkling which must be performed by a clean person, acting in priestly capacity, and which, in his days, was performed almost invariably by the priests, and falsely attributed the consequent cleansing to the self-washing, which was a private personal duty of the cleansed. On the relative position of the two ordinances, the prayer of the Psalmist, in his deep sense of guilt and defilement is very significant. “Purge me with hyssop. Wash me.” He does not once think of self-washing, but looks up to the great High Priest for all. It was unquestionably of the sprinkled water of separation that this writer says, “He that is baptized from the dead, and again toucheth the dead what availeth his washing?” Here again we have an impregnable demonstration.