Introduction

Qohelet is in some ways the most peculiar book of the Hebrew Bible. The peculiarity starts with its name. The long tradition of translation into many languages, beginning with the ancient Greek version, uses some form of “Ecclesiastes” for the title. The Septuagint translators chose that title because it means “the one who assembles,” and the Hebrew root q-h-l does mean “to assemble.” Some have claimed that what it refers to is the assembling of sayings, but this Hebrew verb always takes people, not words or things, as its object, so it may reflect the assembling of audiences or disciples for these discourses. The grammatical form of the word is also odd because one would expect maqhil (causative), not qohelet, and, in any case, qohel (masculine), not qohelet (ostensibly feminine). There are at least two instances in Late Biblical Hebrew of the -et ending to indicate—apparently—the term for a vocation, and that may be the use of the form here, though some doubt still remains. So, we are not entirely sure what Qohelet means, and whether it is a title (at one point in our text, it is preceded by the definite article) or perhaps a proper name. All this uncertainty, and possibly also the ponderousness of “Ecclesiastes,” has led most modern scholars to use the untranslated Hebrew name, a practice I follow here.

In the opening verse, Qohelet is called “son of David,” but that might mean only that he comes from the Davidic line. Jewish and Christian tradition famously identified him as Solomon because of this epithet, because of the repeated stress on his search for wisdom, and because of the autobiographical narrative in chapter 2 in which he speaks of having built many houses and created elaborate gardens and amassed wealth and items of luxury. It is best to think of Qohelet as the literary persona of a radical philosopher articulating, in an evocative rhythmic prose that occasionally scans as poetry, a powerful dissent from the mainline Wisdom outlook that is the background of his thought. It has long been recognized that this is one of the later books of the Hebrew Bible. Some scholars have been tempted to see in it an influence of Greek philosophy, but C. L. Seow argues convincingly on linguistic grounds that the text was probably written a few decades before the conquest of Palestine by Alexander the Great in 333 B.C.E. There are two Persian loanwords and certain turns of language that belong to the late Persian period but no Greek loanwords. (In the Hellenistic period, a flood of Greek words would enter the Hebrew language.) In light of the fact that Aramaic had begun to take over as the vernacular as early as the later sixth and fifth centuries B.C.E., there are also, not surprisingly, turns of speech and terms that show an influence of Aramaic, and there are also some lexical and syntactic features that anticipate rabbinic Hebrew. As to any conceivable Greek background, we should keep in mind that even before Alexander’s conquest, there were commercial and cultural connections between Greece and the Levant, so the possibility cannot be excluded that Qohelet indirectly picked up some motifs of Greek thought. On the whole, however, his unblinking, provocative reflections on the ephemerality of life, the flimsiness of human value, and the ineluctable fate of death read like the work of a stubborn and prickly original—one who in all likelihood wrote in the early or middle decades of the fourth century B.C.E. His frequent invocation of terms drawn from bookkeeping reflect the mercantile economy of the period. His class identity is uncertain, though his politics are conservative.

The way he wrote in some respects resembles traditional Wisdom literature but in others sharply departs from it. The stringing together of moral maxims in concise symmetrical or antithetical formulations, sometimes with rather tenuous connections between one maxim and the next, is clearly reminiscent of the Book of Proverbs. Often, however, Qohelet’s maxims are subversive in content, or seem to be citations of traditional maxims that are challenged or undermined by the new context in which they are set. In a few passages, Qohelet offers entirely pragmatic counsel of a sort one might expect to find in Proverbs. For the most part, however, his observations are properly philosophic, inviting us to contemplate the cyclical nature of reality and of human experience, the fleeting duration of all that we cherish, the brevity of life, and the inexorability of death, which levels all things. Of the propositions he insists on most urgently, only the notions of life’s brevity and of mortality accord with the consensus of biblical belief that had developed by the fourth century B.C.E. The central enigma, then, of the Book of Qohelet is how this text of radical dissent, in which time, history, politics, and human nature are seen in such a bleak light, became part of the canon. Perhaps the ostensible ascription to Solomon shoehorned the book into the canon, but that is hard to judge.

The peculiarity of Qohelet’s philosophic stance is compounded by the peculiarity of his literary vehicle: he is a writer who works out philosophic thought through poetic prose. He has a finely developed sense of expressive rhythm; he makes central use of refrains and other devices of repetition, the stylistic repetition serving as a correlative for the cycle of repetition that in his view characterizes the underlying structure of reality. He often seems to think in metaphors, or, at least, metaphors are used where writers in a different tradition would use abstractions, and the range of overlapping meanings suggested by the concrete image is repeatedly brought into play. By and large, the various modern translations have not done much justice to Qohelet’s literary style, which is inextricably linked with the force and conceptual subtlety of his thought. The King James Version is still the most adequate English rendering of Qohelet’s style—in many respects, it is one of the best performances of the 1611 translators—though it does not always provide an apt equivalent for his verbal concision and rhythmic compactness, and it is not very reliable in the many places where the Hebrew wording is obscure or perhaps defective.

Qohelet’s famous first words, which he will make a much repeated refrain and with which he will conclude the book proper, before the epilogue, are a prime instance of a metaphor serving the function of an abstraction. The King James Version rendered the initial words and all their recurrences as “vanity,” “vanity of vanities.” The seventeenth-century translators obviously had the Latin version in mind, with “vanity” suggesting a lack of value, not self-admiration. This choice has actually been preserved, a little surprisingly, in one recent scholarly translation, C. L. Seow’s Anchor Bible Ecclesiastes. At least a couple of other modern translations have opted for “futility,” and Michael V. Fox, in his admirable analysis accompanied by a translation of the text, insists on “absurdity.” The problem is that all of these English equivalents are more or less right, and abstractions being what they are, each one has the effect of excluding the others and thus limiting the scope of the Hebrew metaphor. The Hebrew hevel probably indicates the flimsy vapor that is exhaled in breathing, invisible except on a cold winter day and in any case immediately dissipating in the air. It is the opposite of ruah,̣ “life-breath,” which is the animating force in a living creature, because it is the waste product of breathing. If, then, one wanted to line up the abstractions implied by hevel, it would include not only futility, absurdity, and vanity but at least insubstantiality, ephemerality, and elusiveness as well. Because of these considerations, this translation has chosen to reproduce the concrete image of the Hebrew, rendering hevel as “mere breath” (“breath” alone doesn’t quite work in English) and representing the Hebrew superlative form havel havalim as “merest breath.” Altogether, Qohelet is preoccupied with entities that exhibit movement but can’t be seen or grasped. Ruaḥ in its other sense of “wind” plays a prominent role in the opening lines of the book, and the metaphor for futility and pointless effort that is often paired with “mere breath” is “herding the wind,” reʿut ruah.̣ (The King James Version seriously misrepresents this, introducing still another abstraction, as “vexation of spirit.”) Even Qohelet’s philosophic quest is repeatedly represented in the Hebrew in concrete, virtually physical terms: he turns around, turns back, like a man in restless pursuit of some maddeningly elusive quarry, trying to find true wisdom. Such wisdom would be the discovery of whether there is any point in human life. If there is not, as Qohelet seems inclined to conclude, he enjoins us to make the most of what we have while we have it—to enjoy in measured fashion good food and wine and a woman one loves, if only the unpredictable course of circumstances makes a person lucky enough to possess these things.

The rather slippery phrase I have just used, “seems inclined to conclude,” is in fact in keeping with the to-and-fro movement of Qohelet’s philosophic discourse. He is a serious thinker who is constantly in motion—another way in which the language of turning and turning back is appropriate to his enterprise. He has an interest in weighing antithetical propositions and moving dialectally among them. Absolute consistency is not his purpose, and so Michael Fox’s title, Qohelet and His Contradictions, is perfectly apt. God appears with some frequency in his reflections on life, and while it is the same term, ʾelohim, used by the Elohist as well as by the Priestly writer at the beginning of Genesis (Qohelet never uses YHWH), this is clearly not the same deity as the one imagined in the dominant currents of biblical theology. The cosmic vista of the prose-poem with which the book begins (1:2–10) makes no mention of God. When the term ʾelohim is finally introduced in 1:13, the context is odd and unsettling: “all that is done under the sun—it is an evil business that God gave to the sons of man to busy themselves with.” This is surely a far cry from the God of Genesis 1 Who commands humankind, as the climactic product of the process of creation, to be fruitful and multiply and to hold sway over all things. The God of the earlier books of the Bible can sometimes be irascible or perhaps even capricious, but He means humanity to fulfill a grand destiny, and it is human dereliction that triggers His wrath and brings down His punishment. Qohelet, who does not altogether reject antecedent tradition, occasionally thinks that God will bring men to judgment, though it is unclear how or when. (Surely not in any afterlife, which is polemically excluded again and again by Qohelet.) Yet here God seems almost perverse in keeping the sons of man busy with an evil business—evil, as the larger context makes clear, not in a moral sense but because it is miserable and pointless, herding the wind. Qohelet has enough of a connection with tradition that he never absolutely denies the idea of a personal god, but his ‘elohim often seems to be a stand-in for the cosmic powers-that-be, for fate or the overarching dynamic of reality that is beyond human control. (It is worth noting that even in earlier texts ‘elohim sometimes has this sense, as in Abraham’s words to Abimelech in Genesis 20:13, “when the gods [‘elohim, here exceptionally treated grammatically as a plural] made me a wanderer,” or when Joseph’s brothers, scarcely inclined to pious locutions, discover the silver in their packs and say “What is this that God has done to us?” [Genesis 42:28].) On this issue as on others, Qohelet’s position may fluctuate. He is not at all impelled to reject theism, but his sense of life is often readily translatable into posttheistic terms: the world is a theater of continuing frustration and illusion; that is the way that God/fate/the intrinsic constitution of reality has determined that it should be.

Do Qohelet’s discourses have a formal structure? Much interpretive ingenuity has been exerted to show that they do. The more elaborate the proposed structure, the less plausible it appears. The movement of Qohelet’s thought is freewheeling and associative. It includes segments of maxims and perceptions that clearly belong together thematically and sometimes in terms of literary formulation (such as the sequences of “better x than y” sayings). Beyond that, it is hard to find architectonic design in the book; on the contrary, the relative looseness of form admirably suits the mobility of Qohelet’s thought. There are, however, strongly articulated framing units at the beginning and the end. The book begins with the great prose-poem about the cyclical futility of all things. This unit is immediately followed by the quasinarrative autobiographical section that runs through to the end of chapter 2, in which Qohelet, in his persona as king of Jerusalem and hence a man endowed with the power and resources to explore all the possibilities of the human condition, steps forward and speaks about his quest from center stage. The autobiographical narrative establishes the context for much that follows, since Qohelet the philosophic searcher and the explorer of experience makes repeated appearances in the pronouncements on life that he proposes. Then the book proper ends with the haunting poem on mortality that is a kind of matching end piece to the prose-poem at the beginning. The vision of futility begins his book, and the vision of decay and death ends it. All along, Qohelet has thought much about the inescapability of death because it is the prime instance of how everything is mere breath: we dream and hope and lust and love, grasp for power and prestige, but the end that awaits everyone is the ineluctable condition of moldering in the grave. Thus the same words that initiated the prose-poem at the beginning aptly conclude the poem at the end: “Merest breath, said Qohelet. All is mere breath.”

How, then, did such a book come to be included in the canon? The process of inclusion, it should be said, was not long in coming, for fragments of Qohelet found at Qumran indicate that it was already part of the library of Scripture there only a century or two after its composition. Some interpreters attribute its embrace by the shapers of the canon to the pious tilt it is given in the epilogue (12:9–14). It has long been the scholarly consensus that the epilogue is the addition of an editor seeking to domesticate Qohelet’s doctrinal wildness, though a couple of recent commentators have tried to argue—unpersuasively, in my view—that the epilogue is consistent with the body of the book and may be the work of the same writer. In any case, it is surely attributing far too much naïveté to the ancient readers to imagine that a few dozen words of piety at the end would deflect them from seeing the subversive skepticism emphatically reiterated throughout the text. We are unlikely ever to have a confident explanation of why Qohelet—or, for that matter, Job or Esther or the Song of Songs—entered the canon, but its inclusion suggests that the canon may not have been determined solely on the grounds of ideological and theological conformity. In regard to its literary power and the uncompromising rigor of its observation of the human condition, this was clearly one of the most original texts produced in the biblical period, early or late. There must have been many Hebrew readers in the last two and a half centuries before the Common Era and on into the Common Era who were not willing to let go of Qohelet, who felt that it somehow belonged in the anthology of texts—not quite yet a canon—that constituted the literary legacy of the nation. They may well have felt this attachment to Qohelet despite the fact that it challenged long-cherished notions about human destiny and the nature of reality. It is even possible that they embraced the book precisely because of the challenges it posed, for there was not a great deal of doctrinal consistency in the whole body of incipiently canonical texts, and the so-called biblical worldview, which is really a construct of later interpreters, was at this early moment far from a settled issue. The pious epilogue should probably be seen not as a way of transforming the audience’s understanding of the text but rather as a no more than hopeful rhetorical gesture, an effort to conclude the book with a seal of official approval unlikely to fool anyone about its actual contents. What continues to engage the moral and philosophic imagination, as it surely must have done in Late Antiquity, is the writer who unblinkingly saw all human enterprise as herding the wind, who envisaged the same grim fate for rich and poor, for the righteous and the wicked, and who was led to question whether wisdom itself in the end had any advantage over foolishness.