Ancient Wisdom Today » Qohelet

A Parable: The Wise and Foolish Invitees

Maer — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 16:44:08 +0000

For this parable, we are going to have the benefit of not only seeing its Hebrew but also two translations. John Hobbins was kind enough to translate the text in two posts entitled “The Parable of the Banquet in the Talmud.” In the first part, he looks at the exchange between R. Eliezer and his students culminating in a quote from Qohelet. Hobbins reminds us of the importance of taking the context of the parables into consideration as they may have never been stand-alone units.

I have my doubts about the tendency to treat parables as self-contained units. They may have been (or may never have been), once upon a time, autonomous units. But, just as is the case with the parables of the New Testament, the parables of the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud do not stand on their own anymore. Relationship to context needs to be taken into full account.

A Time to Cast Away

Maer — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 20:00:50 +0000

We often hear of the power of stories, but sometimes it is good to see a specific example of how stories can help us make sense of what could be difficult to grasp in the abstract. They can also stimulate our imagination through their style, play on words, humor, cleverness, ambiguity, etc.

For this reason, I have often wondered what it would be like to transform Qohelet into a narrative. If you think that such a task is impossible or even ludicrous, the Rabbis didn’t think so. Let me show you an example. In chapter 3 Qohelet starts his “catalogue of times” and in verse 6 he says:

[a time to seek, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away (ESV)]

Qohelet and the Human Experience

Maer — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 00:38:57 +0000

One of the crucial considerations when reading Qohelet is whether or not one thinks that the frame narrator is fundamentally criticizing Qohelet and rejecting his arguments. If this is true, then many would say that the bulk of Qohelet should be understood as “life under the sun” and that we, as Christians, should have a heavenly (i. e. above the sun) perspective of life. Ecclesiastes then, for the most part, becomes a how-not-to book. This way, we fail to do what Murphy says we should do, that is, allow for tensions that would have existed within the author himself, and attempt to explain the book as it stands (Murphy, Tree of Life, 52).

However, reading Ecclesiastes as one piece doesn’t seem to be only a matter of allowing for the tensions within the book but also allowing the book to interpret itself. Sometimes this will yield surprising and insightful results.

Qohelet the Skeptic?

Maer — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 18:14:30 +0000

In any discussion of Qohelet, one needs to quickly decide how the epilogue is to be understood because, in a way, this will inevitably drive the interpretation of the entire book. Because of the seemingly unorthodox character of Qohelet, many commentators have proposed the recognition of glosses that either contradict or soften his “unorthodoxy.” Murphy says that

the tendency today, however, is to recognize such a procedure [contradicting and sugar-coating glosses] as arbitrary; the “contradiction” may well lie in the interpreter’s understanding of the text, rather than with Qoheleth. Hence it seems better to take the book as all of one piece, despite the difficulties. This allows for tensions that would have existed within the author himself, and it attempts to explain the book as it stands (52).

Shooting the “Hevel” with Qohelet

Maer — Sat, 31 May 2008 23:31:01 +0000

One of my favorite books of the bible is Qohelet (Ecclesiastes). When I was a teenager, I became fascinated with this book, for I thought: “here is a book that is asking hard questions about real life!” Of course, in a sense all books of the bible confront us with hard questions and make us think outside our little boxes, but the style of Qohelet was unlike anything I had read up to that point. But as fascinated as I was with this book, it was also extremely frustrating because it didn’t seem to fit the mold of what a biblical book should look like (or what I thought it should look like) and it raised more questions than it answered.