Biblical Hebrew Forum

[George Athas <George.Athas AT moore.edu.au>]

Karl,

You've raised the issue of pseudepigraphy and appear to imply two things:

(1) It is a device intended to deceive the reader into thinking that it was 
written by someone famous, when in fact it wasn't.
(2) Any use of a different persona in writing is necessarily deceptive in the 
ancient world.

The first implication is quite widely accepted, but I don't think it has been 
thought through very well. I don't believe pseudepigraphy was used to deceive 
people (at least not originally) and so create a false authority, but rather 
to secure a wide readership. That is, people were more likely to read a work 
if it was told from the perspective of someone they knew and loved and 
respected. We do the same kind of thing today when we get celebrities to 
host/narrate things like documentaries; the words they say are not their own, 
but a familiar face will appeal to us.

As for the second implication above, I disagree entirely.

Final thought: I'm not arguing that Qohelet is pseudepigraphic. I think the 
use of a different persona is a little more subtle than that. It's a 
rhetorical device that, I believe, the author switches out of very quickly. 
That is, I don't think the persona of Solomon is maintained throughout 
Qohelet. I think it serves a purpose only in the early chapters, and is then 
set aside.


Regards,

GEORGE ATHAS
Moore Theological College (Sydney, Australia)
www.moore.edu.au