Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Trevor & Julie Peterson" <06peterson AT cua.edu>]

Peter wrote:

> I wonder
> if such deliberate confusion of genres ever happened in ancient times,
> or if writers really kept truth and fiction separate. Of course that
> impacts historicity discussions - is a text either all truth or all
> fiction, or can it be a mixture? - but we are not supposed to get into
> that one here.

This is part of what bothered me about Longman's argument. Again, I'm
not trying to say that Qohelet really was written by Solomon, but if
it's a matter of arguing that it was not, I don't know how much his
genre categories do to help that case. For one thing, I don't recall
where he ever distinguished fictional autobiography from real
autobiography (if there was such a thing). How do we know that the form
was not the same regardless (or that the distinction is meaningless,
since all story-telling has some fiction to it)?

Trevor Peterson
CUA/Semitics