The greater you are, humble yourself the more, And you will find favor before the Lord.
⛓ Read Sirach 3 forward — the whole chapter and its afterlife →Where this passage surfaces again, sorted by the strength of the link. Each kind of reuse — formal quotation, deliberate allusion, faint echo, figural pattern — carries its own mark. Follow any reference to read it in place.
Echo2
A fainter, low-volume reuse, carried by recurrence or thematic coherence.
Ben Sira's 'the greater you are, the more you must humble yourself, and you will find favor in the sight of the Lord' is the nearest Second-Temple analogue to Jesus' self-humbling counsel, set likewise in a context of social honor. Deuterocanonical availability and thematic coherence make this a plausible direct echo.
Medium confidence'The greater you are, the more you must humble yourself' supplies a Second-Temple Jewish backdrop for Paul's 'in humility each counting others better than himself.' Availability and coherence are strong (Sirach's humility ethic was widely read), but the verbal overlap is thematic rather than lexical, marking this a faint contested echo.
Low confidence