For who will trust a nimble robber that skips from city to city?: The Greek word translated nimble is a problem. It is a rare word, meaning literally “well belted.” Some take this to mean “lightly equipped, ready for action, able to move about without hindrance.” So Revised Standard Version has a nimble robber. Other renderings with this same sense are “an active robber” (An American Translation), “a roving bandit” (New English Bible), and “the swift-moving bandit” (Revised English Bible). New Jerusalem Bible has “an armed thief,” interpreting “well belted” to mean “equipped with weapons.” The word is actually used in this sense in the Greek of Josh 4.13. Since the Hebrew reads “an armed group,” it makes sense to interpret the word in this way. “An armed thief” is thus better than Good News Translation “a wandering thief.” The Greek word translated skips deserves more color than Good News Translation gives it with “goes.” In both Greek and Hebrew the robber is pictured as jumping or bouncing, meaning that he has no home, that he robs one place and then another unpredictably. An alternative model for this line is “Who will trust an armed thief who keeps moving [or, skipping] from town to town?” Since this is a rhetorical question, another possibility is “You can’t trust an armed thief….”

So who will trust a man that has no home, and lodges wherever night finds him?: The Greek word translated home actually means “nest,” and some translations have that. If it works, use it. A model that restates this rhetorical question as a statement is “So in the same way you can’t trust a homeless person who sleeps in a different place every night!”

Good News Translation reverses the two lines of this verse effectively. In English it is more natural.

Quoted with permission from Bullard, Roger A. and Hatton, Howard A. A Handbook on Sirach. (UBS Helps for Translators). New York: UBS, 2008. For this and other handbooks for translators see here.