He was the first to discover fragment of the Hebrew text of Ben Sira.
He is also of interest because he was the grandfather of Shimon ben Yeshua ben Eliezer ben Sira, the author of the Wisdom of Sirach and possibly the Alphabet of Sirach.
During his doctoral studies Patteson had developed an interest in the first century book, the Wisdom of Ben Sira, Prior to 1964 the only extant Hebrew text of this book was known from the Cairo Geniza collection.
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His research resulted in the establishment of a critical Hebrew text for portions of the first-century B.C. book, The Wisdom of Ben Sira.
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is an American scholar whose knowledge of Biblical Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac and Hellenistic Greek enabled him to undertake an analysis of the text of the Ben Sira Scroll discovered at Masada in Palestine in 1964.
Shim`on ben Yeshu`a ben Sira is not to be confused with his grandfather, Ben Sira, but this article will refer to him simply as Ben Sira for convenience.
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M.Z. Segal, in his commentary on Ben Sira, concluded that the long form with Shim`on should be accepted as original and suggested that the common naming of the book "Ben Sira" is because so many people were named Shim`on at the end of the Second Temple that people often used the family name without "Shim`on."