Qohelet is more commonly referred to as Ecclesiastes. Alter suggests, “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.”” The exact meaning behind Qohelet, however, remains a mystery. “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…. 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.”
Alter continues by laying out the background of the book, “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…. 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…. 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.”
Breath is the recurring theme of the Book of Qohelet. Alter begins, in discussing Qohelet 1:2, by detailing this subject matter and relating why some other translations have missed the mark, “merest breath. The form of the Hebrew, havel havalim, is a way of indicating a superlative or an extreme case. Rendering this phrase as an abstraction (King James Version, “vanity of vanities,” or Michael Fox’s more philosophically subtle “absurdity of absurdities”) is inadvisable, for the writer uses concrete metaphors to indicate general concepts, constantly exploiting the emotional impact of the concrete image and its potential to suggest several related ideas. Hevel, “breath” or “vapor,” is something utterly insubstantial and transient, and in this book suggests futility, ephemerality, and also, as Fox argues, the absurdity of existence.”
In Qohelet 1:5, Alter describes how jarring some philosophical ideas in this book are, “The sun rises and the sun sets. The cyclical movement of day and night is taken as prime evidence in nature of the repetitive cyclical character of reality. This notion is a radical challenge to the conception of time and sequence inscribed in Genesis and elsewhere in the Bible, where things are imagined to progress meaningfully (as in the seven days of creation) toward a fulfillment.” Another theme of the Book of Qohelet is the contingency of life. In Qohelet 3:13, Alter relates, “this is a gift from God. Qohelet repeatedly urges us to enjoy the pleasures of life here and now, but he is perfectly aware that it is a matter of luck, or God’s unfathomable determination, whether we are given the time and means to enjoy the good things of life, or whether we are condemned to die, to uproot, to rip down, to mourn.”
Death is another recurring motif. Alter relates in Qohelet 7:1, “and the day of death and the day one is born. Many commentators understand this to mean that one can never be sure of one’s good name until the end of life, but this make Qohelet blander than he actually is. He begins with a rather anodyne proverbial saying, that a good name (shem) is better than precious oil (shemen), but then he goes on to say that departing life is better than entering it, for life itself, whatever one’s reputation, is a miserable affair from one end to the other.”
In Qohelet 11:8, Alter recounts yet another return to the concept of breath, “Whatever comes is mere breath. It is unlikely that this refers to death, as some have claimed, because in Qohelet it is darkness that is associated with death, whereas “mere breath” is rather the futile substance of worldly experience. Whatever happens, then, in our lives is mere breath—fleeting, insubstantial, without meaning—and all we can do is to take pleasure in what seems pleasurable.” Finally, Alter details a kind of envelope structure framing the book in Qohelet 12:8, “Merest breath, said Qohelet. In a gesture of tight closure, Qohelet repeats precisely the refrain with which he began the book.”
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