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A Scribe Should Marry a Virgin

Apocrypha & Pseudepigrapha Alphabet of Ben Sira, Letter Samech

Curated by The Jewish Mythology Team · Published March 15, 2026

<p>The Alphabet of Ben Sira, a satirical and provocative medieval text composed between 700 and 1000 CE, doesn't shy away from blunt advice about marriage. In this proverb, tied to the Hebrew letter Samech (ס), young Ben Sira tells his teacher that a scribe or educator should marry a virgin.</p>

<p>The reasoning is given through metaphor. "The waters of a virgin are for you alone," Ben Sira says, "but the waters of a non-virgin have already been drawn by a stranger." It's a water-well image, common enough in ancient Near Eastern literature, where a wife's faithfulness is compared to a private spring. The Hebrew Bible uses similar imagery in (Proverbs 5:15-18), where a man is told to "drink water from your own cistern."</p>

<p>This proverb is part of Ben Sira's alphabetical exchange with his teacher. The structure is simple but memorable. The teacher asks the boy to recite proverbs for each letter of the Hebrew alphabet, and what he gets back is shockingly worldly wisdom from a child who shouldn't know any of this yet. That's the joke at the heart of the text. Ben Sira was supposedly born with adult-level knowledge, and his teacher can barely keep up.</p>

<p>The advice reflects the social values of the medieval Jewish communities that produced and circulated this text, where marital purity was a serious concern for the scholarly class.</p>

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