Biblical Hebrew Forum

[K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

Stephen:

If you duck for cover so quickly, how can my rotten tomatoes reach their
mark?

On Fri, Mar 11, 2011 at 12:03 PM, Stephen Shead <srshead+bh AT gmail.com>wrote:

> Hi Kirk (and Karl, as it turns out),
>
>  (My
> opinion, of course ... but what do earlier Jebusite rulers have anything to
> do with anything in Israelite thinking?)
>

Were they only Jebusite rulers? What about Melchisedek?

>
> An extra little complexity for the "literally Solomon" view, which I forgot
> to mention, is in 1:12: Qohelet says "I, Qohelet, was/have been (HYYTY)
> king
> over Israel in Jerusalem". Why the perfect, given that Solomon died in
> office?
>

This is a different subject, namely what actions do the conjugations refer
to? I think this is a good example of why the qatal does not refer to the
perfect tense.

>
> OK, I've started down this path, I might as well blunder on (hence the
> change of subject)...
>
> While we're at it, I have other problems, based on internal evidence (since
> we've thrashed the borrowed words horse), with the identification of
> Solomon, or any other king of Judah for that matter, as the author. (None
> of
> these observations is original, by the way.) The basic issue is that after
> the first two chapters, there is nothing in the rest of the book which even
> hints at a royal identification - and several passages which sound
> downright
> strange if we take them to be coming out of the mouth of the annointed
> davidic king; for example, strong critiques of those in power, and
> consistent 3rd-person references to the king/ruler:
>

First of all, the third person reference to oneself in Biblical literature
is common, starting with Torah where Moses wrote about himself in the third
person.

Most of the book he is not writing for other kings, rather about things that
are common to all people, including kings, to an audience of common people.

>
>
> So why the obvious allusions and "I am the king" references - without ever
> using the king's name - in chapters 1 & 2, and then nothing for the rest?
> The reason, in my view, seems to be 2:12: "for what will the man be like
> who
> comes after the king? He (or They) will do what has already been done."
>
> That is, if the great Solomon himself can't find meaning and purpose and
> durability in these things, with all his wealth and resources and wisdom,
> then it can't be found.
>

Sounds like a good summary.

>
> Of course, if the book was written in the 10th century, all of this is very
> problematic. Was it Solomon, or someone pretending to be Solomon? The
> former
> has difficulties, as shown above ... but if the latter, did they expect
> their readers to "get it", or were they really trying to fool people?
>

The Solomon option has answers, not so the latter.


>
> HOWEVER, if this were written some centuries later (later in the monarchic
> period, after the exile, whatever), then it would be blatantly obvious to
> all that this is a literary device, whereby Qohelet the wisdom teacher is
> putting on the persona of the greatest and wisest king in history, for the
> purpose of philosophical testing of all the potential "meaning-makers" in
> life "under the sun". It would be neither cryptic nor deceitful - no less
> than if I were to write a playful little piece on the English language,
> presenting myself as a well-known English Bard observing with horror the
> modern atrocities that have been committed with my plays...
>

This one has greater difficulties than to assume that Solomon wrote it.

One of the things that I noticed about pre-Babylonian Exile writings are the
extensive oblique statements where the reader has to think about what is
said and to fill in data to make sense of the statements. Often that is
accompanied by a large vocabulary. That is the reason, for example, that I
say that Isaiah 30:14 refers to a blacksmith’s smithy that has been
abandoned. So also Qohelet 2:15, the same thing happens to all people, wise
and foolish, and while that one thing is not directly stated, upon
cogitation one recognizes that he is talking about death. And that’s just
one of his many oblique statements throughout the book.

Post-Babylonian Exile authors apparently generally lacked the vocabulary and
facility with the language to make these literary flourishes, evidence that
Hebrew was for them a second language, not their primary language.

>
> …
> So-that's-perfectly-clear-glad-we-all-agree-on-it...
>

LOL!

>
> <ducking for cover>
>
> Stephen Shead
> Centro de Estudios Pastorales
> Santiago, Chile
>
> Karl W. Randolph.