History of the interpretation of Ecclesiastes
From BibleWiki
It is possible in the space at our disposal to treat the history of the interpretation of Ecclesiastes only in outline. We cannot, as Ginsburg has done in his Coheleth, go into the merits and demerits of all the commentaries of Qoheleth, that have ever been written, whether Jewish or Christian. Those who are interested in such curious details are referred to the "Introduction" of Ginsburg's work, pp. 30-245. It will be possible here to treat in detail only a few of the more important works of recent years, the theories set forth in which are living issues of present-day exegesis.
Contents |
Midrashim
The earliest commentaries on Ecclesiastes are probably represented in the Jewish Midrashim, the beginnings of which go back to the period when the canonicity of the book was first fully recognized, if not to a date even earlier. These works were composed for the edification of congregations, and while the literal sense of a passage was not ignored, if that sense was at all edifying, or would not give offense by its unorthodox character, nevertheless the greatest liberties were taken with the text when it seemed necessary to find edification or orthodoxy in a passage which obviously contained none. The general view of these Midrashim was that Solomon wrote Qoheleth in his old age, when weary of life, to "expose the emptiness and vanity of all worldly pursuits and carnal gratifications, and to show that the happiness of man consists in fearing God and obeying his commands."
As was pointed out above, the Targum of Qoheleth is such a midrashic interpretation. In it unspiritual passages are treated as follows:
Eccl 2:24 — "There is nothing better for a man than that he should eat and drink and enjoy himself," etc. — runs in the Targum: "There is nothing that is more beautiful in man than that he should eat and drink and show his soul good before the children of men, to perform the commandments and to walk in the ways which are right before Him, in order that he may gain good from his labors."
Eccl 5:18 — "A good that is beautiful is it to eat and drink and see good," etc. — the Targum converts into: "Good is it for the children of men and beautiful for them to work in this world that they may eat and drink from their labor so as not to stretch out a hand in violence or plunder, but to keep the words of the law and to be merciful to the poor in order to see good in their labor in this world under the sun."
Eccl 9:7 — "Go eat thy bread with joy and drink thy wine with a glad heart, for already God has accepted thy works" is changed into — "Said Solomon by the spirit of prophecy from before Jah, 'The Lord of the world shall say to all the righteous one by one, Go taste with joy thy bread which has been given to thee on account of the bread which thou hast given to the poor and the unfortunate who were hungry, and drink with good heart thy wine which is hidden for thee in the Garden of Eden, for the wine which thou hast mingled for the poor and needy who were thirsty, for already thy good work has been pleasing before Jah.'"
To men who could read thus into an obnoxious text whatever they liked, every difficulty disappeared. Under the alchemy of allegory and spiritualizing all became easy. Nevertheless sometimes these Midrashim found a way of anticipating the theses of modem criticism that parts of the book refer to the exile or later. Thus the Targum says of Eccl 1:2 — "Vanity of vanities," etc.—"When Solomon, the king of Israel, saw by the spirit of prophecy, that the kingdom of Rehoboam, his son, would be divided with Jeroboam, the son of Nebat, and Jerusalem and the sanctuary would be destroyed and that the people of Israel would go into captivity, he spoke saying, 'Vanity of vanities is this world, vanity of vanities is all for which I and David my father have labored—all is vanity."
Christianity
Meantime, among Christians, the book of Ecclesiastes was being interpreted by similar methods. The earliest Christian commentator on Qoheleth was Gregory Thaumaturgus, who died in 270 A.D., whose Metaphrasis in Ecclesianten Solomonis gives an interpretative paraphrase of the book. The genuineness of this work has been questioned, some assigning it to Gregory Nazianzen, but Harnack still assigns it to Thaumaturgus. (Geschichte der altchristlichen Literatur, I, 430, and Chronologic, II, 99.) Gregory regards Solomon as a prophet, holding that his purpose was "to show-that all the affairs and pursuits of man which are undertaken in human things are vain and useless, in order to lead us to the contemplation of heavenly things." Gregory of Nyssa and Jerome followed in good time with commentaries on the book, and each pursued a similar strain. The allegorical method was employed in its most developed form, especially by Jerome, who wrote his commentary to induce Basilica, a Roman lady, to embrace the monastic life. According to him, the purpose of the book is "to show the utter vanity of every sublunary enjoy¬ment, and hence the necessity of betaking one's self to an ascetic life, devoted entirely to the service of God!"
Started both among Jews and Christians in such paths as these, the interpretation of Ecclesiastes meandered with various windings through the Middle Ages. The Jewish commentators, Tobia ben Eleazar, Rashi, Rashbam, Ibn Ezra, and others often followed more sober and sane methods than many, on account of the rise of a grammatical school of exegesis among the Jews in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, yet even from them allegory and fanciful interpretations did not disappear. Sometimes a Jew, sometimes a Christian, grasped fairly well the purpose of Qoheleth, but most of those who wrote upon it, followed either in the footsteps of the Targum or of Jerome.
Martin Luther was the first to perceive that Solomon cannot have been the author of Ecclesiastes. He says in his "Table Talk": "Solomon himself did not write the book of Ecclesiastes, but it was produced by Sirach at the time of the Maccabees. ... It is a sort of Talmud, compiled from many books, probably from the library of King Ptolemy Euergetes of Egypt."
This opinion of Luther waited, however, more than a century before it found corroboration. Hugo de Groot, the father of international law, better known as Grotius, published, in 1644, his commentary on the Old Testament. He regarded Ecclesiastes as a collection of opinions of different sages, originally spoken to different peoples. He says: "I believe that the book is not the production of Solomon, but was written in the name of this king, as being led by repentance to do it. For it contains many words which cannot be found except in Ezra, Daniel and the Chaldee paraphrasts."
In the next century the work of Grotius began to produce results both in Germany and England. Thus, in the former country, J. D. Michaelis (Poetischer Entwurf der Gedanken des Prediger-Buchs Solomons), in 1751, maintained that a prophet who lived after the exile wrote Ecclesiastes in the name of Solomon, in order that he might be able, in the person of a king so happy and wise, to philosophize all the more touchingly about the vanity of human happiness, while in the latter country, in 1753, Bishop Lowth declared that in Ecclesiastes "the vanity of the world was exemplified by the experience of Solomon, who is introduced in the character of a person investigating a very difficult question" (cf. Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews, xxiv) —thus practically admitting the non-Solomonic authorship of the book.
After this the belief that Solomon did not write the book found increasingly abundant expression. Eichhorn, 1779; Doderlein, 1784; Spohn, 1785; Dathe, 1789; Jahn, 1793, and during the nineteenth century an increasing number of scholars have maintained the same view. Doderlein and Dathe dated the book about the time of the Babylonian exile. Since the dawn of the nineteenth century scholarly opinion has gradually brought the date of the book down, first to the Persian, and then to the Greek, period. The following list is not exhaustive, but it indicates in a general way how scholars have grouped themselves with regard to date. Those who hold to the Persian period are Ewald, Knobel, Hengstenberg, Heiligstedt, De Wette, Vaihinger, Ginsburg, Zockler, Moses Stuart (Commentary on Ecdesiastes), Delitzsch, Nowack, Wright, Cox, Vlock and Driver. On the other hand, the following have assigned it to the Greek period, varying from 330 B.C. (Noyes, Job, Eccl. and Cant.) to 100 B.C. (Renan), viz.: Zirkel, Noyes, Hitzig, Tyler, Plumtre, Renan, Kuenen (Poet. Bucher des A. T.), Strack (Einleitung), Bickell, Cheyne, Dillon, Wildeboer, Siegfried, Davidson (Eccl. in EB.), Peake (Eccl. in DB.), Cornill (Einleitung), Bennett (Introduction), Winckler (Altorientalische Forschungen, 2d ser., 143-159), A. W. Sterne (Ecdesiastes or the Preacher, London, 1900), Margouliouth (Eccl. in JE.), Genung, Haupt and McFadyen (Introduction). Of the nineteenth century commentators whom I have studied, Wangemann (1856) alone holds to the Solomonic date, although Dale (1873) is non-committal with reference to it. Two recent writers, Marshall and McNeile (both 1904), are unable to decide between the Persian and Greek periods. One scholar, Graetz (1871), holds that it belongs to the Roman period and was directed against Herod the Great. Briggs says that it "is the latest writing in the Old Testament, as shown by its language, style and theology" (SHS. 321).
It is clear from the above sketch that an increasing consensus of opinion places our book in the Greek period. The linguistic argument for the non-Solomonic authorship, which Grotius began to appreciate, has been worked out to a complete demonstration by the masterly hand of the late Franz Delitzsch.
Unity
The disconnected character of the book of Ecclesiastes impressed Martin Luther, as we have seen, and led him to regard the work as a compilation. This fact was taken up and advanced by others and, finally, in the hands of Yeard (A Paraphrase upon Ecclesiastes, London), (1701), Herder (1778) and Eichhorn (1779), led to the view that Qoheleth is a dialogue between a refined sensualist and a sensual worldling, who interrupts him, or between a teacher and pupil. A similar view was entertained by Kuenen. Doderlein explained these inconcinnities as the record of the discussions of an "Academy," or group of learned men. Bickell explains them by the supposition that the leaves of an early MS. became disarranged, while Siegfried, McNeile and Haupt explain them on the supposition of later interpolations. Some of these views will be examined more in detail below.
On the other hand, the unity of the book has been strenuously maintained by such scholars as Ginsburg, Zockler, Delitzsch, Plumtre, Wright, Briggs, Wildeboer, Cornill and Genung. Briggs classes Koheleth with Job as a type of moral heroism wrestling with foes to the soul, and winning moral victories over doubt and error (SHS., pp. 425-426). Cornill declares that "Old Testament piety nowhere enjoys a greater triumph than in the book of Qoheleth" (Introduction to Can. Bks. of OT., 1907, p. 451). Plumtre, Briggs, Cornill et al. before them, regard the contradictory expressions of the book as the varying moods of the writer, as his childhood's faith struggles with the mass of doubt and pessimism which fills his mind.
Zirkel, in 1792, Untersuchungen uber den Prediger, propounded the theory that Qoheleth evinces the formative influence of Greek thought and the Greek language—that its idiom betrays the presence of Greek forms of speech, and that the influence of Stoic philosophy is no less evident.
Zirkel's view was revived and maintained by Hitzig (Comm., 1847), Kleinert (Der Prediger Solomo, 1864), and by Thomas Tyler in his Ecdesiastes—A Contribution to its Interpretation, London, 1874, who finds in the book evidences of Greek linguistic influence, as well as the traces both of Stoic and Epicurean thought. Tyler maintained that the Sadducees represented Epicurean influence, and the Pharisees Stoic influence, that the Talmud gives proof of the existence of Jewish schools, or academies, and that the mingling of contradictory ideas in the book is accounted for by supposing that the work is a record of the discus¬sions of one of these academies.
Plumtre maintains (Ecclesiastes in Cambridge Bible, 1881), as does Tyler, that there are two streams of Greek Philosophical influence, one Stoic and one Epicurean, but, as previously re¬marked, attributes the contradictions to the varying moods of the author, whose mind gives house-room now to one set of opinions and now to another. Pfleiderer (Die Philosophic des Heraklit van Eph., nebst Koheleth und besonders im Buck der Weisheit, 1886) maintained the existence of traces of Greek influence in Qoheleth, but traced them to Heraclitus.
Siegfried (Prediger und Hoheslied, in Nowack's Handkommentar, 1898) and Haupt (Koheleth, oder Weltschmerz in der Bible, Leipzig, 1905, the Book of Ecclesiastes, Baltimore, 1905) both hold to this Greek influence (though Haupt confines it to the thought, denying any linguistic influence from Greek), but both account for the different philosophic strains by supposing that different parts of the work are from different writers. These theories will be set forth in greater detail below. From this general view of the course of the criticism of Ecclesiastes we pass to examine in detail some of the more important theories concerning it, which have been produced within the last forty years.
Graetz
Graetz, in his Koheleth (1871), notes that Qoheleth directs his remarks in several instances against a tyrannical king, whom he also calls a slave (so Graetz understood גצי). Graetz remarks that none of the Asmonaeans were tyrants, and argues that these characteristics suit Herod the Great alone, whom the Talmud (Baba Bathra, 3b, and Ketuboth, 24) called the "slave of the Asmonaeans." To this period he thought the language of the book, with its mingling of late Hebrew and Aramaic forms, also pointed. The book on this view is a kind of political satire. Graetz denies that the author was a Sadducee, and regards him as a young Jew of the mild, strenuosity-abjuring school of Hillel.
Graetz did regard the author, however, as an out and out sensualist, and finds as he interprets Qoheleth many allusions to the gratifications of desire. These interpretations have been shown by many later commentators to be in most cases unwarranted. Qoheleth was no advocate of debauchery, as is proven by an intelligent interpretation of his utterances in detail. As to Graetz's Herodian date for Koheleth recent commentators find it too late. The external evidence, as is shown below (§13), makes it impossible that the book should be so late.
The contradictions of the book Graetz sought to soften by a theory of dislocations. Such a theory had first been suggested by J. G. van der Palm, in his Ecclesiastes philologice et critice illustratus, Leyden, 1784. Graetz placed ch. 7.11f after ch. 5.6, removing ch. 5.7 to take their place after ch. 7.10; 10.4 he removed to come after 8.4, and 7.19 he placed after 9.17. Later commentators, however, have not found these changes sufficient to harmonize the contents of the book.
Graetz denied that the last six verses of the book (12.29-14), formed a part of the original work. Moreover, he held that these were to be divided between two hands. Vv.12-14 were, Graetz held, a colophon to the whole Hagiography, written at the time Qoheleth was received into the canon, as Krochmal had previously suggested. How much of this position is right, and what part of it is untenable, will appear as we proceed.
Bickell
A more radical theory of dislocations was put forth by the late Professor Bickell of Vienna in 1884 in his little book, Der Prediger uber den Wert des Daseins, also set forth in more popular form in 1886 in his Koheleth's Untersuchung uber den Wert des Daseins. Bickell declared that the book is unintelligible as it stands, and that this lack of clearness was produced in the following way. Qoheleth was written in book form on fascicles consisting of four leaves once folded, or four double leaves. Each single leaf contained about 525 letters. Qoheleth was a part of a book which contained other works written on an unknown number of such fascicles.
Qoheleth began on the sixth leaf of one fascicle and ended on the third leaf of the fourth succeeding fascicle. The string which held these fascicles together broke and the middle fascicle fell out. The leaves were found by some one not qualified to put them together, who took the inner half of the second fascicle, folded it inside out, and then laid it in the new order immediately after the first fascicle. Next came the inner sheet of the third fascicle, followed by the outside half of the second, into the middle of which the two double leaves, 13, 18, 14, 17 had already been inserted. Although the fourth fascicle kept its place, it did not escape confusion, for between its leaves the first two leaves of the remaining sheet of the third fascicle found a place. Finally, leaf 17, becoming separated from its new environment, found a resting place between 19 and 21. This dislocation removed from the work all traces of its plan.
In the new form it frequently happened that some of the edges did not join properly—a fact which led in time to the insertion of glosses. From this dislocated archetype all extant texts of Qoheleth have descended.
If now the original order of the leaves be restored and the glosses removed, the work falls into two distinct halves, a speculative and a practical, each distinguished from the other by its own appropriate characteristics. According to Bickell the first half demonstrated that life is an empty round, and that wisdom only serves to make its possessor modest, so that he does not get on as well as the vainly boasting fool. In part two the advice of Qoheleth is, in view of the fact that life offers no positive good, to make the best of such advantages as we have, to live modestly before the ruler and before God, and to expect everything to be vanity.
The epilogue Bickell thought was from a later hand. This elaborate theory, rejected by most scholars, as too ingenious and improbable, has been accepted in full by Dillon, who sought in his Skeptics of the Old Testament, 1895, to commend it to English readers. The theory is not only intricate and elaborate to a degree which creates doubts that, if it were true, a modern scholar would ever have divined it, but it breaks down archaeologically in its fundamental assumption that the book form had succeeded the roll form in literary libraries at a date sufficiently early for it to have played the part in the history of Qoheleth supposed by Bickell.
If an accident, such as Bickell supposed, had happened to the exemplar of Ecclesiastes, it must have been earlier than the Greek translation of the book, for the same confusion which Bickell supposes is present in the Greek as well as in the Hebrew text. Even if the Greek translation were made as late as we have supposed above, that was at a date in all probability too early for a literary work to have been written in book form. An examination of the published papyri, found in such large numbers in Egypt by Grenfell and Hunt in recent years, tends to prove that literary works were written in roll form until after the first century A.D., and that the book form did not supersede the roll for more than an¬other hundred years. For evidence, see e.g., the Archaeological Report of the Egypt Exploration Fund, 1905-1906, p. 10ff., where literary rolls written in the second and third centuries A.D. are described. See also Gregory, Canon and Text of the New Testament, 1907, p. 317 f., who holds that the book form did not come in until ± 300 A.D. The fundamental assumption of Bickell's theory is accordingly improbable.
In presenting this theory to English readers, Dillon has added a new element to the study of the book. Being an Aryan scholar, he declares (op. cit., 122 ff.) that Buddhism is the only one of the world-religions in which such practical fruits as we see exhibited in Qoheleth are manifested. Instead of going to Epicureanism to explain these, he accordingly declares that they are due to Buddhistic influence. King Acoka tells us (see V. A. Smith's Acoka, the Buddhist Emperor of India, Oxford, 1901) in one of his inscriptions, that in the early part of the third century B.C. he had sent Buddhistic missionaries to the court of the Seleucidae at Antioch and the court of the Ptolemies at Alexandria. Dillon, accordingly, declares that by 205 B.C. Qoheleth, even if he lived in Jerusalem, might have known Buddhism, though Dillon thinks it more probable that he lived in Alexandria.
Haupt
In 1894 Professor Paul Haupt, in a paper entitled "The Book of Ecclesiastes," published in the Oriental Studies of the Oriental Club of Philadelphia, declared, "There is no author to the book of Ecclesiastes, at any rate not of the book in the form in which it has come down to us. ... It reminds me of the remains of a daring explorer, who has met with some terrible accident, leaving his shattered form exposed to the encroachments of all sorts of foul vermin. ... In some cases there are half a dozen parallel strata of glosses."
This hint of Haupt's was taken up by D. C. Siegfried, who in his Prediger und Hoheslied, 1898, in Nowack's Handkommentar elaborated it into the theory that five different hands contributed to the contents of Qoheleth, and two different epilogists and two different editors in addition have taken part in bringing the work into its present form.
This theory of Siegfried greatly overworks an undoubted fact, viz.:— that different hands have had a part in making the book of Ecclesiastes. It is built upon the supposition that absolutely but one type of thought can be harbored by a human mind while it is composing a book. In periods of transition, on the contrary, one can give house-room to widely divergent thoughts. While this fact should not lead us to think that a writer who has penned a sentence is likely flatly to contradict himself in the next, it should prevent us from carrying analysis to the extent which Siegfried has done.
Zapletal, in 1904, in his little book, Die Metrik des Buches Kohelet, maintained the thesis that Qoheleth is (or was) metrical throughout, and that this fact enables the critic to reject a number of later glosses, which mar the metrical form.
In 1905 Haupt, in two publications, Koheleth, published in Leipzig, and The Book of Ecclesiastes, published in Baltimore, developed still further the view that he had set forth in 1894. Independently of Zapletal, he also set forth the theory that the book was written in metrical form, and in a way much more thorough-going than Zapletal has revised the text to make it conform to metre.
Haupt has in these works carried out the idea expressed eleven years before that the original work of Qoheleth has been piled with glosses. Of the 222 verses of the book, he retains but 124 as genuine—barely more than half—and even from these many small glosses have been subtracted. The most radical feature of Haupt's work is, however, his rearrangement of the material which he regards as genuine. The material is transposed and rejoined in an even more radical way than Bickell had done, and without Bickell's palaeographical reason for it. Few verses are left in the connection in which we find them in our Bibles, so that an index becomes necessary to find a passage in the book. On any theory (except Haupt's), no ancient editor took such liberties with the text as Haupt himself has taken. He has practically rewritten the book, basing his changes partly on his metrical theory, but in larger measure on his own inner sense of what the connections ought to be.
As to the date, Haupt believes that the original Ecclesiastes was written by a prominent Sadducsean physician in Jerusalem, who was born at the beginning of the reign of Antiochus Epiphanes (175-164) and died in the first decade of the reign of Alexander Jannaeus (104-79 B.C.). The author may have been a king in Jerusalem, if king be taken as in Gittin, 62a, and Berakoth, 64a, to mean the head of a school. The genuine portions of Ecclesiastes are Epicurean, while in the Pharisaic interpolations Stoic doctrines are found. The original writer may have completed the book about 100 B.C., when he was 75 years old.
This view of the date ignores the important testimony of the book of Ecclesiasticus, which will be presented in detail below. Its testimony makes the interpretation of ch. 4.13-16, which Haupt applies to Alexander Balas, and on which he mainly relies for his date, impossible, tempting as that interpretation is. The idea that Qoheleth was a physician, rests upon no more substantial basis than the anatomical interpretation of ch. 12.2-6, and to freeze the poetic metaphors of that passage into anatomy, is no more justified than to freeze the poetic metaphors of the Psalms into theology. Ingenious and brilliant as Haupt's work is, it contributes little to the real understanding of Qoheleth, as in almost every feature it rests, as it seems to me, on assumptions which are incapable of proof and do not commend themselves. Meantime, in 1904, the Cambridge University Press had issued McNeile's Introduction to Ecclesiastes, to which reference has already been made. This work is important from the higher critical as well as from the text-critical point of view. McNeile recognizes with Haupt and Siegfried that the book has been interpolated, but in his view the interpolated portions are far smaller than they suppose, and the process of interpolation much simpler.
McNeile also differs radically from Haupt and Siegfried as regards the influence of Greek philosophical thought on Qoheleth, maintaining that there is no clear trace of it. McNeile adduces strong reasons for supposing that the point of view expressed in the book of Ecclesiastes is the natural product of Semitic, or, more specifically, of Jewish thought, in the conditions which prevailed in late post-exilic time, that this thought resembles Stoicism in a general way because Stoicism was a similar product of Semitic thought, Zeno, the founder of the Stoics, being a Phoenician born at Kition in Cyprus.
Genung
In the same year, 1904, Professor Genung of Amherst published his Words of Koheleth, in which he essays an interpretation more from the point of view of a student of literature than from that of a text-critic or an ordinary exegete. Genung argues earnestly for the unity of Ecclesiastes and exhibits little patience with any divisive theory. He regards Qoheleth as the first in Hebrew thought to follow the inductive method, and explains many of the seeming contradictions of the book by the supposition that the grafting of the inductive method onto the ordinary forms of expression em¬ployed by the "Wisdom" writers would necessarily in its first attempt betray the "prentice" hand and leave much in the way of literary harmony to be desired. Qoheleth, says Genung, "frequently reverts to a mashal to clinch his argument." Genung overlooks the fact that the larger part of the proverbs in the book do not clinch, but interrupt the argument.
In Genung's view the purpose of Qoheleth was to recall the religious spirit of the time back to reality, and that the result of his reasoning is to make life issue, not in religiosity, but in character. There is an element of truth in this, but Genung has greatly overworked it.
On one point Genung speaks with the authority of a literary expert. He declares that Qoheleth is essentially a prose book, having the prose temper and the prose work to do. "It contains little, if any, of that lyric intensity which riots in imagery or impassioned eloquence." He also justly observes that the form of Hebrew poetry is largely absent from the book, declaring that for the sake of continuity of thought the writer has abandoned the hampering form of poetry, which would compel returns of the thought to former utterances. In this it must appear even to a superficial reader of the book that, with some exceptions, Genung is right.
