Koheleth

“ A critic of narrower experience represents Koheleth partly as a cynical Hebrew Pasquin, who satirises the hated foreigner, Herod the Great, and the minions of his court, partly as an earnest opponent of a dangerous and growing school of ascetics. I refer to this theory here, not to criticise it, but to call attention to its worthier conception of Koheleth’s character. The tendency of Ecclesiastes Dr. Grätz considers to be opposed to the moral and religious principles of Judaism and Christianity, but to the man as distinguished from his book he does full justice. ”

“ Let us now consider the Epilogue itself.
And moreover (it should be said) that Koheleth was a wise man; further, he taught the people wisdom, and weighed and made search, (yea) composed many proverbs. Koheleth sought to find out pleasant words, and he wrote down [333] plainly words of truth. The words of the wise are like goads, and like nails well driven in; the members of the assemblies [334] have [in the case of Ecclesiastes] given them forth from another shepherd. ”

“ Koheleth has had too hard a battle with his own tongue to be a ‘charming writer,’ and even if not exactly blasé (see however ii. 1-11) , he is ‘fatigued’ enough with the oppressive burdens of Jewish life in the second century B.C. That he has no enthusiasm, and none of those visions which are the ‘creators and feeders of the soul,’ [363] is cause for pity, not for admiration ”

“ It is grounded upon the rejection of the Messianic expectations and absolute disbelief in the solemn promises of Jahveh Himself. Koheleth cherishes no hope for the individual, his nation, or the human race. The thing that hath been is the same that shall be, and what befell is the same that shall come to pass, and there is no new thing under the sun.... [141] "I surveyed all the works that are wrought under the sun, and behold all was vanity and the grasping of wind." ”

“ Sirach knows no future life and no Messiah; but he believes in the eternity of Israel; why, on the ground of his fragmentary remains, deny the same consolation to Koheleth? Much as I should prefer to imagine a far more satisfactory close for his troubled life (see Chap. IX.) , I think we ought to admit the possibility of this hypothesis.
As an author, the characteristics of Koheleth are in the main Hebraic, though not without vague affinities to the Greek philosophic spirit. His work is without a model, but the dramatic element in it reminds us somewhat of the Book of Job. ”

“ This judgment also goes too far; the figure of death which Koheleth presents contains no anticipation of modern discoveries; yet it is not without its value for the historical development of anthropology, for science and poetry combine in it; it is as true to fact as it is poetically beautiful.
The author has now reached the close. His Koheleth-Solomon has made all earthly things small, and at last remains seated on this dust-heap of vanitas vanitatum. The motto-like saying, Ecc 1:2, is here repeated as a quod erat demonstrandum, like a summary conclusion. ”

“ Such is Koheleth’s conception of life, which, except so far as it is marred by a vague notion of Fate which is fatal to philanthropy, is not very different from the idea growing in our own time. “The All is a never-ceasing whirl” (i. 8) , and Koheleth advises that each individual man try to make what little circle of happiness he can around him. “O my heart!” says Omar Khayyám, “thou wilt never penetrate the mysteries of the heavens; thou wilt never reach that culminating point of wisdom which the intrepid omniscients have attained. ”

“ To accuse Koheleth of Epicureanism is to take a one-sided view of his philosophy. His conception of life, its pleasures and pains, is as clearly and emphatically expressed as that of the Buddha or of Schopenhauer. He is an uncompromising pessimist, who sees the world as it is. Everything that seems pleasant or profitable is vanity and a grasping of wind; there is nothing positive but pain, nothing real but the eternal Will, which is certainly unknowable and probably unconscious. ”

“ The motive of Koheleth's purpose, to weigh wisdom and folly against each other as to their worth, consists in this, that a king, especially such an one as Solomon was, has in the means at his disposal and in the extent of his observation so much more than everyother, that no one who comes after him will reach a different experience. ”

“ When we draw near the land which loveth silence. 270We have seen that the Wisdom of Sirach betrays a taste for Egyptian festivity (p. 191) . May we not suppose that Koheleth too had travelled to Alexandria? This view commends itself to Kleinert, and I have no objection to it with due limitations. Koheleth may have envied and sought to copy the light-hearted gaiety of the valley of the Nile. But we ought not to conceal the fact that the lines quoted above are followed by others which have no parallel in Koheleth. ”

“ The view of several of the most authoritative scholars—in which I entirely concur—is that Koheleth was written in Alexandria during the reign of Ptolemy V. (Epiphanes) , who came to the throne as a boy under the guardianship of tutors and was alluded to in the verse: "Woe, land, to thee whose king is a child."
[150] Some of them were foreigners resident in India who, after their conversion, preached the new doctrine to their fellow-countrymen. Thus, one of the earliest and most successful missionaries was a Greek, whose Indian name was Dharmarakshita. ”

“ Koheleth is not only a Jew, but a man of culture. He cannot perhaps entirely defend himself from the subtle influence of the Greek view of life, and is even willing to associate from time to time with the ministers of alien sovereigns. ”

“ Thus the book known as the Wisdom of Solomon, which is accepted as canonical by the Roman Catholic Church, contains a flat contradiction and emphatic condemnation of certain of the propositions laid down by Koheleth, as, for instance, in ch. ii. 1-9, which is obviously a studied refutation of Koheleth's principal thesis, couched mainly in the identical words used by the Preacher himself:
"For they have said, reasoning with themselves, but not right: the time of our life is short and tedious, and in the end of a man there is no remedy, and no man hath been known to have returned from hell. ”

“ A life of true service—one whose centre is outside self or family or even nation—is not vanity nor vexation of spirit: Koheleth might have added this as the burden of a second part of his book. But did he not actually append it as his epilogue? Did he not ‘faintly trust’ the hope of immortality (xii. 7) ? Did he not work his way back to a living faith, like ‘Asaph’ in Ps. lxxiii.? There is no question that the book was admitted into the Canon on the assumption that he did. As a great Jewish preacher says, the book [in its present form] opens with Nothingness, but closes with the fear of God. ”

“ It was natural enough that Hebrew theologians should have hesitated to stamp with the seal of orthodoxy a book which the poet Heine calls the Canticles of Scepticism and in which every unbiassed reader will recognise a powerful solvent of the bases of theism; and the only surprising thing about their attitude is that they should have ever allowed themselves to be persuaded to abandon it.
For Koheleth's pessimistic theory, which has its roots in Secularism, is utterly incompatible with the spirit of Judaism, whichever of its historical phases we may select for comparison. ”

“ The Book of Koheleth is, on the one side, a proof of the power of revealed religion which has grounded faith in God, the One God, the All-wise Creator and Governor of the world, so deeply and firmly in the religious consciousness, that even the most dissonant and confused impressions of the present world are unable to shake it ”

“ But it is not so much the practical as the intellectual side of this endowment and this peculiar dignity of human nature which Koheleth brings her to view.
It is not enough for man to know that everything that happens has its divinely-ordained time. There is an instinct peculiar to his nature impelling him to pass beyond this fragmentary knowledge and to comprehend eternity ”

“ The true student may no doubt be equally severe upon Koheleth for his despair of wisdom and depreciation of its delights (i. 17, 18, ii. 15, 16) , which are hardly redeemed by the utilitarian sayings in vii. 11, 12.
I cannot justify Koheleth, but I can plead for a mitigation of these censures, and altogether defend the admission of the Book (not, of course, as Solomonic) into the sacred Canon. Whether Jewish or not, the pessimistic theory of life has a sound kernel. ‘Our sadness,’ as Thoreau says, ‘is not sad, but our cheap joys. ”

“ The present, Koheleth knows, is far from ideal, but he would fain reconcile young men to inevitable evils by pointing them to the relative goods still open to them. This attitude of the author enables Grätz to account for Koheleth’s denial of the doctrine of Immortality. This doctrine, he remarks, was not of native Jewish origin, but imported from Alexandria, and was the source of the ascetic gloom opposed by Koheleth. ”

“ Kalisch, however, in full accord with the spirit of Judaism, makes Koheleth frankly accept ‘worldliness’ as a good, understanding by ‘worldliness’ a sense of worldly duties and enjoyments. Had this however been Koheleth’s meaning, would he not have coined another of his favourite abstract terms (comp. the Peshitto’s ’olmoyuthō = αἰὼν in Eph. ii. 2) ? (2) ‘Also he has put eternity into their heart, but so that man cannot’ &c. So Ginsburg and Delitzsch (desiderium æternitatis, taking ‘eternity’ in a metaphysical sense = ‘that which is beyond time’) ”

“ At this point Koheleth turns away from the young to those (presumably) of his own age. Again there are traces at least of a series of distichs which must once have stood here, but either the author or one of his editors, or both, have so far worked over them that the series is no longer perfect. The first suspected instance of this ‘overworking’ occurs at the very outset. ‘Remember thy Creator in the flower of thine age,’ are the opening words of Koheleth’s second address. They are usually explained as taking up the idea of the last judgment expressed at the close of xi. 9. ”

“ III. At this point Koheleth commences another line of argument; he notices that all things proceed according to a fixed and settled order of providence. This truth he brings into great prominence by instancing eight-and-twenty――a fourfold seven――different times or seasons existing in human life. From this he deduces the conclusion, that as it is impossible to alter the order of Providence, the toil of man is useless to effect any real good, so far as this world is concerned. ”

“ Attending then to these principles of grammar, the meaning will be, ‘observe this, I have found it, and announce it as Koheleth,’ an additional proof that here we have a personal experience of Koheleth’s) one to one to find a wise result, (that is collecting instance after instance, or trying one method after another so as to find the wise result, in contrast to the disappointing folly mentioned above) which yet seeks my soul, and has not found (the ‘not’ is emphatic, and denies that he has discovered it: experimental science did no more for him than moral) ”

“ In a word, the universe is a wheel that revolves on its axis for ever—and there is no ultimate aim or end in it all. [92] Knowledge, wisdom, and enjoyment, each of which Koheleth characterises by a distich, are likewise vain, or worse. What, then, is the secret of "happiness"? Surely not wealth, which the Preacher himself having possessed and applied to "useful" and "good" purposes, proved emptiness in the end. ”

“ All is not ‘vanity,’ if there is in human nature a point connecting a man with that world, most distant and yet most near, where in the highest sense God is. If Koheleth wrote xii. 7b, he cannot have written xii. 8, any more than the author of the Imitation could have written Vanitas vanitatum both on his first page and on his last. Yet who but Koheleth can be responsible for it? For the later editors of whom I have spoken, would be far from approving such a reversal of the great charter of man’s dignity in the eighth Psalm. ”

“ I hated then, I myself (emphatic pronoun, because again we have Koheleth’s personal experience, as we should say, ‘I was disgusted’) , with respect to all my toil which I (again strongly personal, meaning so far as it was my toil) had toiled at under the sun that I should leave it (close relative qualifying the verb, and giving the idea that the grievance was that he would have to leave this work) to a man (i.e. some man as a human person) which will be after me.
19 And who knoweth whether he shall be a wise man or a fool? ”

“ His aim was ‘to brighten Koheleth’s gloomy view of the world, partly by emphasising the doctrine of a present retribution, but still more by pointing to a future judgment in which inequalities should be rectified.’ The third hand is that of the so-called pseudo-Solomonic interpolator. He must have gone to work after the Epilogist, for the latter simply knows Koheleth as a wise man skilled in proverbial composition. Bickell also claims to make transpositions on a small scale, and offers many emendations sometimes based on the Septuagint. ”

“ The fair inference from this is, that the root-meaning of the Hebrew word is ‘to counsel,’ just as the root-meaning of the word Apostle is ‘one sent.’ These senses are just what the context requires. Koheleth turns round to see wisdom in comparison with, or contradistinction to, false hopes and false prudence, and asks how the man, that is, humanity, can tell the one from the other. ”