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.

In the second part, he looks at the parable of a king who invited his servants to a feast (hence the title of the parable). He also provides a list of non-biblical expressions in the Talmud text and a vocalized biblical Hebrew assimilation that makes it a lot easier to read.

In the book They Also Taught in Parables, the authors go all the way to the end of Berakhot 153a since the last unit has R. Meir’s son-in-law expanding on the last parable. To make things a little easier to follow, I will divide this whole section (as demarcated by the book) into three parts. The first two will follow Hobbins’ sense-units and the last will include the conclusion. I will first provide the translation in They Also Taught in Parables (PT) followed by the Hebrew text and Hobbins’ translation (HT) (expect, of course, for the last part).

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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.

This can be seen in Peter Enns’ article about our understanding of the phrase (usually rendered as “the whole duty of man”, NIV, ESV and KJV) in 12:13. My intention is not to reproduce the article here but to give you a taste of the main contours of his argument and offer some personal reflections. Read more »

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).

I recently heard a preacher say that the end of Ecclesiastes is really all that matters. The implication is that most of the book contains little that will be of ultimate value. I have become quite intrigued by the difficulty that most of us have in reading Qohelet. But I have to admit that part of the problem is the interpretation of the book and that this interpretation, as Murphy says, “began with the editing of the book itself” (59). Read more »

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. Read more »

The Tree of Life: An Examination of Biblical Wisdom Literature was written by Roland Murphy and seems to be highly recommended (with your usual caveats) as an introduction to wisdom literature. Part of the reason I wanted to read this book was because Murphy also covers Ben Sira and Wisdom of Solomon, and I wanted to sink my teeth into these books (I plan to read them when I get to chapters 5 and 6). Read more »