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Ecclesiastes, part 1, Introduction

The Hebrew title of this book is Koheleth, “Assembler, Convener, Public Preacher,” from the word kahal, “to assemble.” The Greek Septuagint renders it Ekklesiastes, “one who addresses the assembly (church), from the word ekklesia, “those called out to assemble.” In the New Testament, ekklesia is commonly translated “church.” Hence, an ecclesiastic is a church official, bishop, or preacher speaking to an assembly.

Authorship

Koheleth speaks as a royal sage, a wise man traditionally associated with Solomon (1:1, 1:12), though many scholars see this as a literary persona, not a strict historical person. The authority is experiential wisdom, not prophetic oracle.

Despite the Solomonic voice, several internal features point to a later composition. The Hebrew of Ecclesiastes is late biblical Hebrew, containing Aramaic words and expressions as well as vocabulary from the Persian era. It also differs markedly from Proverbs and Song of Songs. This suggests a date a few centuries after Solomon, who died in 931 B.C.

Koheleth speaks as someone looking back on Israel’s monarchy as a long-past institution. Koheleth says: “I was king over Israel in Jerusalem” (1:12), as if looking back on Solomon’s reign. Solomon never ceased to be king until his death, so if he had been writing this book personally, how could he treat his reign in the past tense?

The epilogue speaks about Koheleth in the third person. Ecclesiastes 12:9 says,

⁹ In addition to being a wise man, the Preacher also taught the people knowledge; and he pondered, searched out and arranged many proverbs.

This strongly implies an editor or disciple had preserved Koheleth’s teachings and that the book was framed and canonized later. Hence, it is the voice of Solomon but recorded by another. In this way it is similar to the Proverbs attributed to Solomon though compiled later (Prov 1:1; 25:1)

Jewish tradition generally accepted Solomon as the author. They grouped Ecclesiastes with Proverbs and Song of Songs as Solomonic wisdom. Early Christian tradition followed Jewish understanding and read Ecclesiastes as the mature, repentant Solomon reflecting late in life

The Wisdom Triad

Proverbs, Job, and Ecclesiastes form a “wisdom triad. Proverbs is about how life normally works in the moral order as men seek wisdom, Job when it catastrophically doesn’t but is full of injustice and suffering, and Ecclesiastes when it drifts ambiguously and seems to have no real meaning.

Ecclesiastes is the Bible’s most sustained meditation on limits: Limits of knowledge, limits of justice, limits of effort or labor, and limits of time. Ecclesiastes asks: “What can be known, secured, or guaranteed within the limitations of human mortality?” It does not destroy faith but refines our faith by ridding it of unrealistic expectations. Ecclesiastes trains readers in intellectual humility and honest faith.

The Meaning of Life

Though Ecclesiastes deals with wisdom and understanding, it declares from the outset that “all is vanity.” It is not that life is meaningless but that it is a vapor, transient, short, and limited. The Hebrew word for “vanity” is hevel, which literally means “breath, vapor, mist, a puff of air.” In other words, life is mortal, fleeting, temporal, and ultimately outside of our control.

Each of us is called to do our small part in carrying the Kingdom Plan forward in the short time that we are given, before passing the baton to the next generation. If we learn wisdom and can pass it on to the next generation, the resources accumulated by our labor are not in vain but build the Kingdom of God for the future. Nonetheless, because we are mortal, such the use of our resources, both tangible and intangible, depends on the teamwork of succeeding generations.