Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

Karl, you're committing a classic faux pas: mistaking the world of the text 
for the real world and using them interchangeably. You're not alone in this. 
Many, many people do it. But this does not make it excusable. Now in many 
(perhaps even most) cases, there is considerable overlap between the world of 
the text and the real world, particularly as it projects real persons and 
events into a literary form. But they are not exactly the same. It is a 
mistake to assume that the narrator/speaker of a text is necessarily the same 
as the author. You have to find a datum outside the text itself to confirm 
this.

To add to Don's comments, Qohelet very much evinces a style at home in the 
Persian and/or Hellenistic contexts. In particular, the reticence to use the 
divine name in favour of a more generic אלהים is consistent with the waning 
of henotheistic religions in the Persian Era and beyond. The philosophical 
questioning of a classic Deuteronomistic theology is also something that 
flourishes in the Persian Era and beyond, and this is very much a key 
ingredient in the rise of apocalypticism, as Don mentioned.

Finally, your comments about the loanwords are not actually building an 
argument. A range of possibilities may exist to explain a situation, such as 
the presence of a loanword in Hebrew, but this does not mean that each 
possibility has equal weighting. To treat them as though they do is a gross 
mistake in argumentation. And to then make a conclusion based on a weak 
possibility is to make a very weak argument. Many of the 'possibilities' that 
you mentioned are essentially arguing from silence. There is little to no 
evidence for the possibilities you mention. It's much preferable to work with 
hard data and draw conclusions from them, than to make conclusions while 
lingering in logical limbo.



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