What does Ecclesiasticus Chapter 38 say, and which statements belong to its speaker?

Ecclesiasticus 38 honors the physician as needed and created by God, praises healing, skill and royal gifts, and commends medicines from earth, the wood that sweetened bitter water, and the apothecary's preparations. Illness calls for prayer, turning from sin, offerings and a place for the physician. It does not require completing spiritual reconciliation before summoning care. Physicians themselves beseech God for relief and remedy.

The dead should receive tears, burial and fitting mourning, followed by comfort. The day-or-two language is qualified by merit and concern about detraction, rather than a clinical maximum for all grief. The speaker discusses sorrow, diminished strength and substance, irreversible death and remembering one's own end, with yesterday's death and today's contrasting judgment.

The chapter turns to the scribe's leisure and demanding crafts: ploughman and cattle, varied engravings, smith's heat and hammer, potter's foot-driven wheel, shaping and glazing vessels and cleaning furnace. Each is wise in his art and necessary for building a city. The difficult statements about dwelling, assembly, judgment and parables remain in the outline without silent inversion. Crafts strengthen the world, their prayer concerns their work, and the final soul-and-law statement is retained without changing its subject.