Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Heard, Christopher" <Christopher.Heard AT pepperdine.edu>]

On 12/24/04 4:28 AM, "Giuseppe Regalzi" <regalzi AT interfree.it> wrote:
> Proverbs, Song of Songs and Qohelet _do_ claim authorship by someone --
> falsely, as many think, but nonetheless they do.

Proverbs includes multiple internal claims for collection and authorship of
_smaller collections_ within the book, but has no attribution of
authorship/collection/etc. for the book as a whole.

Qohelet is an interesting case. If we take "I, Qohelet" as a straightforward
claim of authorship, it's still clear that the author is using some sort of
pseudonym (or did his mother really name him with a feminine participle?)
_and_ that someone has "framed" the book with the superscription in 1:1 and
the commentary in 12:9ff. Now it is also possible to view the superscription
in 1:1 and the commentary in 12:9ff. as entirely original to the
composition, and thus Qoheleth would have to be regarded as a literary
persona rather than a real person.

Song of Songs has a claim of authorship only if you take the lamedh on
leShlomo in 1:1 as "lamedh auctoris." That is not the only way to take a
prefixed lamedh, of course, and since I think Solomon is portrayed in a
rather sort of cynical and disapproving way within the psalm, it is not I
think consonant with the rest of the book to take it as such. But that is a
judgment call.

-- 
R. Christopher Heard
Assistant Professor of Religion
Armstrong Fellow in Religion
Pepperdine University
http://faculty.pepperdine.edu/cheard
http://www.iTanakh.org
http://www.semioticsandexegesis.info