Abraham and the fear of God: He observed the law of the Most High and entered into a covenant with him. Ben Sira 44:20

The Book of Ben Sira, due to its length and practical content, is perhaps the most important book of the sapiential literature of the Bible. The book begins with a dissertation praising wisdom as a gift from the Lord, and then continues with a series of practical wisdom sayings on various topics, ending with how wisdom was poured out on humanity.
And so Ben Sira, at the end of his sapiential book, mentioned a group of notable people from biblical history, from the patriarch Enoch to the high priest Simon, who fought for the independence of his country during the Hellenistic period.
And among these notable people, Ben Sira wrote about the patriarch Abraham, a very interesting text with these words: "He observed the law of the Most High and entered into a covenant with him" Ben Sira 44:20. This text is interesting, in a spiritual sense, because it refers to the law of the Most High at a time when the law of Moses had not yet been promulgated and the Israelites as a people did not exist. So, faced with this situation, a reader of the Bible might ask what the law of the Most High meant for the wise, and the answer has a profound spiritual meaning.
God did not choose Abraham because he was a rich or famous man, but for a very simple reason: the patriarch Abraham was a God-fearing man. The fear of God as a spiritual gift contains within itself the deepest meaning of the law of Moses, even Jesus, when teaching the parable of the sower, referred to this mysterious spiritual gift.
The sapiential literature explains that the loving bond between man and God begins with the fear of God. Through this gift, men are children of the Most High; moreover, the first and second commandments of the Law of Moses are summarized in the fear of God, or in other words, the first two commandments require that God must be feared and not men. To state, then, that Ben Sira referred to the spiritual gift of fear of God as the divine law is not in itself erroneous. It must be remembered that in the history of the people of Israel, when the descendants of Abraham hardened their hearts, that is, when they lost the fear of God, the entire law of Moses lost its true meaning, and its blessings were nullified. The life of Abraham is therefore the demonstration that any covenant with God, like the Abrahamic covenant or the Davidic covenant, has its foundation in the fear of God.

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