Another Look at Qoheleth 7 23 29

Tyndale Bulletin, 2020

1986

1988

This study analyses the theological thought of Qoheleth. In the Introduction, a survey of Qoheleth studies in the last hundred years has shown that the literary structure of the book of Qoheleth is still crucial to the understanding of the theological thought of Qoheleth. Thus, Chapter One of this thesis Is devoted to discussing various approaches, i. e. traditional critical, form critical, and modern literary approaches, which have been employed in the study of the structure of the book. Chapter Two analyses the structure of Qoheleth's theological thought, arguing that '7]T (the absurd) and fflri (joy) are the two concepts which make sense of Qoheleth's thought and also form the fundamental structure of his thought. Together with various secondary themes such as portion, profit, wisdom, wealth, death, remembrance and God, they form the total structure of Qoehleth's thought. This is followed by a reading of Qoheleth in Chapter Three, analysing the argument of the boo...

Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society (JETS), 2023

Intertextual resonance within the wisdom corpus presents Lady Wisdom as a composite character composed of the created order, excellent woman, and female Song of Songs lover. Representing the entire created order, Lady Wisdom functions as a synecdoche for the most important and most difficult component of wisdom-an excellent woman. The man who failed to find the excellent woman failed to find Lady Wisdom. Marriage to Dame Folly would create such a dissonance in his life that he would be unable to live according to wisdom-the order of creation. The composite nature of Lady Wisdom becomes apparent through (1) a lexical and thematic study of Lady Wisdom in Proverbs 1-9, the excellent woman, the wife of one's youth, and the female lover of the Song of Songs; (2) the composite nature of the antagonist to Lady Wisdom-Dame Folly; (3) the character of Ruth; and (4) Solomon's women in Ecclesiastes and Song of Songs. In Ecclesiastes 7, Solomon, though wise, failed to find Lady Wisdom because he failed to find the excellent wife. Solomon had a thousand women, but none of them were Lady Wisdom (Eccl 7:28). Intertextual resonance between 1 Kings 11, Ecclesiastes 7, and Song of Songs 8 reveal that Solomon not only was unable to find Lady Wisdom but was metaphorically rejected by her (Song 8:11-12).

Verbum et Ecclesia

Religious and existential concerns interweave in many books of the Bible to give attention to human’s existential anguish, the sense of guilt, the horror of death, the atrocious experience of the absurd. While many contemporary existentialist philosophers prefer to do without God in the attempt to deal with human’s existential contradictions, the search takes the authors of the Bible through intense spiritual struggles as they attempt to confront the belief in the goodness of God with the human experience of futility in all its facets. We want to seek a meeting point between the existentialist concerns of the book of Qoholeth with the profound theology of meaningfulness as elaborated in Genesis 1:1–2:4a. Our article therefore, has a decidedly pastoral orientation. We will attempt to move, through an analysis of select texts, to a re-affirmation of one of the spiritual truths that many mystics have tried to teach: that reason alone is not enough to guide the human person to the myste...

The use of the article in the book of Qoheleth is commonly considered chaotic and taken as an argument in favor of a non-Hebrew original of the book or of its late date of composition. However, the claim of inconsistencies in the use of the article in the book of Qoheleth should be reexamined in light of the use of the article in cognate North-West Semitic languages and of linguistic study of the article. Indeed, a careful and close reading of single verses and sections of the text in their respective contexts reveals that the article is used in a meaningful and logical manner in order to convey the author’s thought in his own, particular perspective. Therefore, any grammatical analysis of the article in the Hebrew Bible should be concerned with possible contextual reasons of its use and non-use.