Apart from the fact that a large portion (about two-thirds) of our book has in recent years been found in Hebrew, which very often gives the original form, the following considerations made it certain, even before this was found, that the original language was Hebrew: in his Prologue to the book the translator says: “Things originally spoken in Hebrew have not the same force in them when they are translated into another tongue; and not only these, but the Law itself, and the Prophecies, and the rest of the books, have no small difference when they are spoken in their original form.” Although he does not actually say so, it is pretty obvious that Ben-Sira’s grandson implies here that he translated his grandfather’s book from Hebrew. In the second place, in St. Jerome’s time it would appear that Hebrew manuscripts of the book existed in Palestine, for in his preface to the Books of Solomon he says that he found the book of Jesus the son of Sirach in Hebrew. Then, again, in later times Saadiah (A.D. 920) speaks of the existence of copies of the Hebrew text, and he says that the vowel-points were added, which was, as a rule, only done in the case of canonical books.[349] And lastly, in a number of cases the renderings of the Greek necessitate the assumption that they were translated from Hebrew. But all doubt, where such existed, was set at rest by the discovery (1896-1900) of a number of fragments of the Hebrew text. Those to whom this important find, or rather series of finds, is due are Mrs. Lewis and Mrs. Gibson, Cowley and Neubauer, Schechter and Taylor, G. Margoliouth, Levi, Adler, and Gaster. Altogether about thirty leaves were found; they are fragments belonging to four different manuscripts, and they all came from the Genizah of a synagogue in Cairo. As all these manuscripts are written on paper and not on vellum they cannot be earlier than the ninth century A.D., for paper was not introduced until this century[350]; they all belong probably to the end of the tenth or the beginning of the eleventh century.[351]