Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Ron Snider <sarasotapt AT comcast.net>]

George wrote:

> There's a critical distinction to be made when it comes to literature written 
> in the first person: the 'speaker' in the text is not necessarily the actual 
> author. What I mean is that an author may take on the persona of someone else 
> (real or fictional) and write from the perspective of that person. It's a 
> very common technique. So, it is an assumption to say that because the 
> 'speaker' in Qohelet claims to be Solomon that Solomon must be the author. 
> You might be right, but you have made a logical leap on the basis of an 
> assumption to say that. Therefore, in the same way that you call for someone 
> to prove the author was not Solomon, so also you would need to prove that it 
> was.
>
> Having said that, I find it very odd that the 'speaker' never actually comes 
> out and calls himself Solomon. Reading the Hebrew, I would argue it is far 
> more likely that the speaker (and the author?) was named Qohelet. But again, 
> I cannot prove that; I can only postulate it.
>   

I agree completely with your assessment that an author can write from 
the perspective of another person.  However, can you provide any 
significant examples of this in the Hebrew Old Testament?  If the 
speaker is claiming to be Solomon, and is not, that makes him a 
bald-faced liar.  Why would anyone read "spiritual literature" if the 
author was known, or even thought, to be yanking your chain?

Personally, I would not take any such literature too seriously, 
particularly literature that has "spiritual roots". 

Again, my only point is that the best evidence points to Solomon, and 
when others seek to get around this be redating the text based on a few 
loan words, I don't find that to be good scholarship.  Solomon appears 
to have had as much, and likely far more, interaction with other nations 
than other Hebrew king, and that during the time of greatest peace in 
Israel.  The fact that he would have had a breadth of vocabulary, given 
his purported wisdom, and documented interactions with other cultures, 
does not strike me as strange in the least.

Regards,

Ron Snider