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Ecclesiastes Study on the Book of Ecclesiates - John Schultz Bible-Commentaries.Com ECCLESIASTES Ecclesiastes is one of the most elusive books in the Bible. Its message seems profound, but at the same time empty, gloomy and even full of boredom and despair. It seems to be a handbook of nihilism. The Hebrew keyword hebel, ‘meaningless,’ occurs 38 times in the book. It is the same word that is found in the verse: ‘They made me jealous by what is no God and angered me with their worthless idols. I will make them envious by those who are not a people; I will make them angry by a nation that has no understanding.’1 J. Sidlow Baxter, in Exploring the Book, states about Ecclesiastes: ‘This book of Ecclesiastes has been a much misunderstood book. Pessimists have found material in it to bolster up their doleful hypotheses. Skeptics have claimed support from it for their contention of non-survival after death. Others have quoted it as confirming the theory of soul-sleep between the death of the body and the yet future resurrection. Besides these, many sound and sincere believers have felt it to be an unspiritually-minded composition, contradictory to the principles of the New Testament, and awkward to harmonize with belief in the full inspiration of the Bible. It is the more needful, therefore, that we should clearly grasp its real message, and understand its peculiarities. Misapprehensions such as those just mentioned come about through a wrong way of reading. People read the chapters simply as a string of verses in which each verse is a more or less independent pronouncement, instead of carefully perceiving that the verses and paragraphs and chapters and sections are the component part of a cumulative treatise. Ecclesiastes is not the only part of Scripture which is wronged by this kind of reading; but it suffers the more by it because when the links in the chain of reasoning are thus wrenched apart they lend themselves to an easy misunderstanding. Those interpretations of this or that or the other verse, which contradict the design and drift and declarations of the book as a whole, are wrong. Authorship In its introduction to the book, The Pulpit Commentary states: ‘The book is called in the Hebrew Koheleth, a title taken from its opening sentence, ‘The words of Koheleth, the son of David, King in Jerusalem.’ In the Greek and Latin Versions it is entitled ‘Ecclesiastes,’ which Jerome elucidates by remarking that in Greek a person is so called who gathers the congregation, or ecclesia … In modern versions the name is usually ‘Ecclesiastes; or, The Preacher.’ Luther boldly gives ‘The Preacher Solomon.’ This is not a satisfactory rendering to modern ears; and, indeed, it is difficult to find a term which will adequately represent the Hebrew word. Koheleth is a participle feminine from a root kahal (whence the Greek kale>w, Latin calo, and English ‘call’), which means, ‘to call, to assemble,’ especially for religious or solemn purposes. The word and its derivatives are always applied to people, and not to things. So the term, which gives its name to our book, signifies a female assembler or collector of persons for Divine worship, or in order to address them. It can, therefore, not mean ‘Gatherer of wisdom,’ ‘Collector of maxims,’ but ‘Gatherer of God’s people’ (… 1 Kings 8:1); others make it equivalent to ‘Debater,’ which term affords a clue to the variation of opinions in the work. It is generally constructed as a masculine and without the article, but once as feminine (… Ecclesiastes 7:27, if the reading is correct), and once with the article (… Ecclesiastes 12:8). The feminine form is by some accounted for, not by supposing Koheleth to represent an office, and therefore as used abstractedly, but as being the personification of Wisdom, whose business it is to gather people unto the Lord and make them a holy congregation. In Proverbs sometimes Wisdom herself speaks (e.g. … Proverbs 1:20), sometimes the author speaks of her (e.g. … Proverbs 8:1, etc.). So Koheleth appears now as the organ of Wisdom, now as Wisdom herself, supporting, as it were, two characters without losing altogether his identity. At the same time, it is to be noted that Solomon, as personified Wisdom, could not speak of himself 1. Deut. 32:21 1 of 103 Study on the Book of Ecclesiates - John Schultz Bible-Commentaries.Com as having gotten more wisdom than all that were before him in Jerusalem (… Ecclesiastes 1:16), or how his heart had great experience of wisdom, or how he had applied his heart to discover things by means of wisdom (… Ecclesiastes 7:23, 25). These things could not be said in this character, and unless we suppose that the writer occasionally lost himself, or did not strictly maintain his assumed personation, we must fall back upon the ascertained fact that the feminine form of such words as Koheleth has no special significance (unless, perhaps, it denotes power and activity), and that such forms were used in the later stage of the language to express proper names of men … If, as is supposed, Solomon is designated Koheleth in allusion to his great prayer at the dedication of the temple (… 1 Kings 8:23-53, 56-61), it is strange that no mention is anywhere made of this celebrated work, and the part he took therein. He appears rather as addressing general readers than teaching his own people from an elevated position; and the title assigned to him is meant to designate him, not only as one who by word of mouth instructed others, but one whose life and experience preached an emphatic lesson on the vanity of mundane things.’ Date Nelson’s Illustrated Bible Dictionary states: ‘King Solomon of Israel, a ruler noted for his great wisdom and vast riches, has traditionally been accepted as the author of Ecclesiastes. Evidence for this is strong, since Solomon fits the author’s description of himself given in the book: ‘I, the Preacher, was king over Israel in Jerusalem. And I set my heart to seek and search out by wisdom concerning all that is done under heaven’ (1:12-13). But some scholars claim that Solomon could not have written the book because it uses certain words and phrases that belong to a much later time in Israel’s history. These objections by themselves are not strong enough to undermine Solomon’s authorship. The book was probably written some time during his long reign of 40 years, from 970 to 931 B.C.’ Solomon’s authorship has been accepted and refuted throughout the centuries. We will not enter into the controversy in the context of this study and simply accept the most ancient traditions that attribute the book to Israel’s wisest king. The message of Ecclesiastes The International Standard Bible Encyclopaedia probably makes the best comments about the content of the book, stating: ‘In the preface the speaker lays down the proposition that all things are unreal, and that the results of human effort are illusive (Eccl 1:2-3). Human generations, day and night, the wind, the streams, are alike the repetition of an unending round (vs 4-7). The same holds in regard to all human study and thinking (vs 8-11). The speaker shows familiarity with the phenomena which we think of as those of natural law, of the persistence of force, but he thinks of them in the main as monotonously limiting human experience. Nothing is new. All effort of Nature or of man is the doing again of something which has already been done. After the preface the speaker introduces himself, and recounts his experiences. At the outset he had a noble ambition for wisdom and discipline, but all he attained to was unreality and perplexity of mind (vs 12-18). This is equally the meaning of the text, whether we translate ‘vanity and vexation of spirit’ or ‘vanity and a striving after wind,’ (‘emptiness, and struggling for breath’), though the first of these two translations is the better grounded. Finding no adequate satisfaction in the pursuits of the scholar and thinker, taken by themselves, he seeks to combine these with the pursuit of agreeable sensations-alike those which come from luxury and those which come from activity and enterprise and achievement (Eccl 2:1-12). No one could be in better shape than he for making this experiment, but again he only attains to unreality and perplexity of spirit. He says to himself that at least it is in itself profitable to be a wise man rather than a fool, but his comfort is impaired by the fact that both alike are mortal (vs 13-17). He finds little reassurance in the idea of laboring for the benefit of posterity; posterity is often not worthy (vs 18-21). One may toil unremittingly, but what is the use (vs 22,23)? 2 of 103 Study on the Book of Ecclesiates - John Schultz Bible-Commentaries.Com He does not find himself helped by bringing God into the problem. ‘It is no good for a man that he should eat and drink and make his soul see good in his toil’ (vs 24-26, as most naturally translated), even if he thinks of it as the gift of God; for how can one be sure that the gift of God is anything but luck? He sees, however, that it is not just to dismiss thus lightly the idea of God as a factor in the problem. It is true that there is a time for everything, and that everything is ‘beautiful in its time.’ It is also true that ideas of infinity are in men’s minds, ideas which they can neither get rid of nor fully comprehend (Eccl 3:1-18).
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