Ecclesiastes and the Riddle of Authorship

Thomas M. Bolin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781845530730
• eBook ISBN: 9781317297604
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

In Ecclesiastes, the authorial voice of Qohelet presents an identity that has challenged readers for centuries. This book offers a reception history of the different ways readers have constructed Qohelet as an author. Previous reception histories of Ecclesiastes group readings into "premodern" and "critical, " or separate Jewish from Christian readings. In deliberate contrast, this analysis arranges readings thematically according to the interpretive potential inherent in the text, a method of biblical reception history articulated by Brennan Breed. Doing so erases the artificial distinctions between so-called scholarly and confessional readings and highlights the fact that many modern academic readings of the authorship of Ecclesiastes travel in well-worn interpretive paths that long predate the rise of critical scholarship. Thus this book offers a reminder that, while critical biblical scholarship is an essential part of the interpretive task, academic readings are themselves indebted to the Bible's reception history and a part of it.

1
Qohelet as Solomon

The narrative voice of Qohelet states that he was David’s son and king over Israel in Jerusalem. The longest and most widely held understanding of the author of Ecclesiastes understands this description literally, and reads the book as the composition of Solomon, the son of David and Bathsheba, who reigned over Israel in Jerusalem (1 Kgs 2:12). This interpretation is so pervasive that we even find it in the Arabian Nights. In recounting his first voyage, Sindbad says that while he had been born wealthy, he had squandered his wealth by the time he was a young man.

I was stricken with horror and dismay at the gravity of my plight, and bethought myself of a proverb of our master Solomon son of David (may peace be upon them!) which my father often used to cite: “The day of death is better than the day of birth, a live dog is better than a dead lion, and the grave is better than poverty.”¹

The cited “proverb” is really three separate sayings. The first two are citations from Ecclesiastes (7:1 and 9:4). The third is attested in a collection of sayings, Ghurar al-Hikam wa-Durar al-Kali (Exalted Aphorisms and Pearls of Speech, compiled ca. 510/1116) attributed to Alī ibn Abī Ṭālib (d. 40/661) the companion of Muhammad and the last of the “rightly guided prophets” in Sunni Islam. The persistence of the name of Solomon, combined with the flexibility of the cited sayings—the two proverbs from Ecclesiastes occur two chapters apart in the book, and the third saying isn’t in the Hebrew Bible at all—show how proverbial sayings and legendary sages can move across cultures and attract other sayings. The three sayings together do not offer a coherent worldview. The first assumes a world fraught with such suffering and injustice that death is to be preferred to life. The second takes the opposite tack: because the poor live longer than the powerful, and it is better to be poor and live. The third saying qualifies the first by limiting the preference of death only to poverty, and rebuts the second, saying that death is to be preferred to poverty.

The default belief for centuries prior to the rise of modern biblical scholarship was that Solomon was the book’s author. In his reception history study of Ecclesiastes, Eric Christianson notes that “the significance of Solomon as author” grew “almost grotesquely out of proportion.”² It is not clear exactly when the equation between Qohelet and Solomon arose. The earliest extant interpretations of Ecclesiastes, in the rabbinic literature, already assume Solomon to be the author.³ There is a wide range of dates for the rabbinic texts, but even the earliest proposed (ca. 1st century CE) is still anywhere from 200 to 400 years later than the composition of Ecclesiastes. If we push further back, the Wisdom of Solomon, dating from the 2nd century BCE, refutes thoughts found in Ecclesiastes about the absence of an afterlife and the importance of enjoying life before death. Wis 2: 1–9 describes as “ungodly” (ἀσεβεῖς) those who say: that people are born by chance (2:2); that upon death we return to dust while our spirit evaporates (2: 2–3); that there will be no remembrance of people after they die (2:4); and so people ought to live a life of sensuous enjoyment “as in youth… because this is their portion and lot” (ὡς ἐν νεότητι… ὅτι αὕτη ἡ μερὶς ἡμῶν καὶ ὁ κλῆρος οὗτος [2:6, 9]).⁴ It is unclear whether the author of the Wisdom of Solomon is attacking Ecclesiastes in particular or those views in general but the parallels with Ecclesiastes, right down to the use of “portion” and “lot” to describe life, are striking. It would be significant if the Wisdom of Solomon were in fact giving a rebuttal of a viewpoint in Ecclesiastes, because the Wisdom of Solomon is also attributed to Solomon. Its author would therefore be asserting his own “Solomonic” authority against that of Qohelet, who is described here as “godless.”⁵

As mentioned in the introduction, this book analyzes understandings of Qohelet as an author by means of Brennan Breed’s use of semantic nodes in doing reception history. It is not a chronological reception history. But because Qohelet was equated with Solomon for such a long time, I need to address the issue of Solomonic authorship in this chapter before I proceed with revealing different semantic nodes for Qohelet in readings of Ecclesiastes. This chapter’s discussion of Solomonic authorship is not the only place to look for all the pre-modern readings of Ecclesiastes that understood Qohelet to be Solomon. Doing so would remove these readings from the semantic nodes in which they would otherwise appear and create the impression that pre-modern and modern, critical readings of Ecclesiastes are essentially different. In many respects they are not. Instead, in the following chapters, pre-modern and modern readings will be grouped into their relevant semantic nodes, giving a vivid picture of the persistence and continuity of certain readings. In this chapter I want only to examine how ancient readers relied upon a constructed Solomonic biography and their belief that Solomon had written Ecclesiastes to help make sense of it.

On Coherence and Contradiction

In his description of the author function Foucault observes that contradictions in a text may be resolved by subsuming them under a larger unity, namely the author.⁶ Solomonic attribution of Ecclesiastes is a prime example of this, and many readings of Ecclesiastes deal with the book’s contradictions by appeal to the figure of Solomon delineated in the cultural norms of these other writings. One of the earliest discussions of the book centers on its contradictions. In the Talmud, b. Šabb. 30b, it is said that the wise (חכמים) tried to store or put aside (לגנוז) Ecclesiastes because its words contradicted each other (סותרן זה את זה). The rabbis resolve the problem by claiming that the presence of “words of Torah at its beginning and at its end” (שׁתחילתו דברי תורה וסופו דברי תורה; in reference to Eccl 1:2, 12:13) override any contradictions in the book.⁷ This is a neat solution, relying as it does on the assumption that the beginnings and ends of books are normative for how one is to interpret the text in the middle and more importantly, that the words supporting the ideology of readers take precedence over any that challenge that ideology. Katharine Dell argues that contradictions were a greater obstacle to the acceptance of Ecclesiastes in early Judaism than the problem of Solomon having written something heterodox, but of course, the possibility that Solomon would have written something heterodox is itself a contradiction to those for whom Solomon is a paragon of wisdom.⁸ That is to say that the idea of contradiction operates here on two levels: where a text contradicts itself, and where a text contradicts things outside of itself, such as views of the author that are drawn from other sources or what other normative texts say. It is important that Dell highlights the relationship between the authorship of Ecclesiastes and the book’s theological content. It also points out how the belief in Solomonic authorship actually created a way out of the problem of any inconsistencies in Ecclesiastes. While the Talmud is clear that some saw contradictions in Ecclesiastes as a problem, it is not as if the remainder of the biblical texts are free of this phenomenon. This is why the last of Rabbi Ishmael’s thirteen exegetical principles is that two contradictory texts are resolved by appeal to a third. The Midrash also notes that the rabbis wanted to put aside (גנז) Ecclesiastes (Ecclesiastes Rabbah 11:9). Unlike the Talmud, this is not because of internal contradictions but due to an external one, between Ecclesiastes and the Torah of Moses.

א״ר שמואל בר׳ יצחק בקשו חכמים לגנוז ספר קהלת שמצאו בו דברים שמטין לצד מינות אמרו כל חכמתו של שלמה כך שאמר שמח בחור בילדותך ויטיבך לבך בימי בחורותיך והלך בדרכי לבך ובמראה עיניך ומשה אמר ולא תתורו אחרי לבבכם ואחרי עיניכם ושלמה אמר והלך בדרכי לבך ובמראה עיניך הותרה הרצועה לית דין ולית דיין כיון שאמר ודע כי על כל אלה יביאך האלהים במשפט אמרו יפה אמר שלמה

R. Samuel b. Isaac said, “The sages wished to put away the book of Ecclesiastes because they found that its words tend toward heresy.” They said that all of Solomon’s wisdom is in his words, “Rejoice, young man, in your youth. Let your heart cheer you in the days of your youth. Walk according to the wishes of your heart and the desire of your eyes” [Eccl 11:9a]. But Moses said, “Do not follow after your hearts or your eyes” [Num 15:39] and Solomon said, “Walk according to the wishes of your heart and the desire of your eyes.” Is the restriction removed? Is there judgment without a judge? But [Solomon] also said, “Know that for all of these God will bring you to judgment” [Eccl 11:9b]. And they said, “Solomon has spoken well.”

The contradiction between a saying of Qohelet (Eccl 11:9a) and the Torah (Num 15:39) is resolved by means of appeal to a second text in Ecclesiastes (Eccl 11:9b). A doctrinal conflict between Moses and Solomon is no contest. The king must be brought into agreement with the lawgiver. Note how the problem is resolved by appeal to another text from Ecclesiastes. The rabbis do not explicitly appeal to the greater authority of the Mosaic text in its contradiction with its Solomonic counterpart. Instead they find a text in Ecclesiastes that agrees with the Torah. The argument is not solved by appeal to authority, even though there is no doubt whatsoever that the rabbis held the works attributed to Moses to be of greater authority than those attributed to Solomon. Rather, because the Torah is more normative than Ecclesiastes, the rabbis find a way to bring the teaching of Ecclesiastes in line with that of the Torah by bringing into the discussion a third text—which necessarily needs to be from Ecclesiastes—that conforms with the injunction of Moses. If the rabbis had not believed that the text was written by Solomon, they would not have bothered with the interpretive strategies to explain the book’s contradictions. This will not be the last time that the contradictions in Ecclesiastes appear in this book. Both ancient and modern readers struggle with them, and their resolutions of them appear in more than one semantic node discussed in chapter three.

Solomon’s Biography

Foucault also points out that an author’s biography both helps to interpret an individual text, giving it a context and limiting interpretive choices, and resolves tensions among a group of texts attributed to a single author.⁹ Both of these uses of Solomon’s biography are present in readings of Ecclesiastes. Most biographies of Solomon are based on the biblical material in 1 Kings and 1–2 Chronicles, which gives the following picture: Solomon was the son of David and Bathsheba. He succeeded to the throne on his father’s death and reigned in Jerusalem for forty years. During that time, he engaged in massive building projects, most notably a sumptuous temple for Yahweh. He amassed such wealth that silver was as common as stone and counted for nothing (1 Kgs 10: 21–27). Solomon was also the wisest man who ever lived because of a direct gift of wisdom from Yahweh. This only added to his prestige and power, and foreign rulers came to him for advice. This overview cannot do justice to the biblical accounts, which are filled with the hyperbole and plotlines that characterize folklore. But the Bible’s own summary statement is to the point: “Solomon was greater in wealth and wisdom than all the rulers of the world” (ויתגדל המלך שלמה מכל מלכי הארץ לעשר ולחכמה [1 Kgs 10:23, 2 Chr 9:22]).

The fly in the ointment of this otherwise rosy portrayal is Solomon’s sponsoring of the worship of gods other than Yahweh. In what seems like an edited variant of the typical story of the fantastically wealthy monarch, 1 Kings 11 mentions Solomon’s huge harem, but diverges into a lengthy description of how Solomon both built shrines for the gods of his foreign wives and also worshipped these gods himself. The text says that Solomon “walked after” (וילך ׁשלמה אחרי) Astarte and Milcom, and built altars and high places for Chemosh, Molech, and other gods not named. This violation of his agreement with Yahweh justifies the division of the kingdom after Solomon’s death. The phrase “they [foreign wives] turned away his heart” (ויטו נשׁיו את לבו/נשׁיו הטו את־לבבו) used twice in verses 3–4 to describe the king’s apostasy, both echoes and contrasts with Solomon’s great wisdom. “Heart” in biblical Hebrew (לב/לבב) refers to intellectual capacity, or what we would call the mind. When God gives Solomon wisdom in 1 Kings 3, he specifically grants the king “a wise heart” (לב חכם v. 12). Now Solomon turns his mind away from the source of his wisdom and directs it toward other gods. While it is not surprising that the patriarchal author of 1 Kings 11 blames Solomon’s wives for his apostasy from Yahweh, it is important that he states in verse 3 that this occurred when the king was old. The idea of the great king becoming feeble minded or weak in his old age and listening to women (which in a patriarchal culture would have been thought a sign of male weakness) parallels the biblical account of the end of David’s life in 1 Kings 2. There the great king ends his days shivering in ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Qohelet as Solomon
• 2 Qohelet the King
• 3 Qohelet and Contradiction
• 4 Qohelet, Saint and Sinner
• 5 Qohelet the Philosopher
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index