Ecclesiastes as Witness: A Personal Essay

American Poetry Review, The, Jan/Feb 2005 by Ostriker, Alicia

Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable.

-Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

One is obliged to bless for the evil as well as for the good.

-Mishnah, Berachot 9.5

THE MOST BRILLIANTLY PESSIMISTIC TRACT of all time, a dense mix of prose and poetry, the Biblical book of Ecclesiastes contains a treasury of quotations rivaling Shakespeare. Consider how many turns of phrase have their origin in the King James Version of it. "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity" is its opening salvo. "The sun also rises" gives a title to Hemingway, "remembrance of things past" gives one to Proust, and "the house of mirth" gives one to Edith Wharton. "There is nothing new under the sun," "The race is not to the swift," and "A living dog is better than a dead lion," are among its many pungent sentences. In Ecclesiastes we also find "cast thy bread upon the waters," "eat, drink and be merry," and "for everything there is a season." As a store of pure wisdom, the book is by common agreement unequaled.

But what is wisdom? Should reading this book make us feel depressed? Exhilarated? Agitated? Or serene? Does it ask us to believe that this life is the only one we should expect, or does it ask us to trust in an afterlife? Is the God who is invoked some three dozen times in the text in any way benevolent? Is he even real? Did one author write the skeptical bits I applauded, in the days of my youth, and another the pious bits which I elided from consciousness?

Commentary tosses up large disagreements. The text is pious and skeptical. It was composed by a single, or two, or plural authors, or it was a patchwork cobbled together by an editor.1 It is a dialogue with the self. It is an argument between despair and hope. It is essentially Epicurean, although "apikorus" later becomes the Hebrew word for heretic. It is essentially Stoic. Its genre, fictional autobiography, goes back to Akkadian literature. It represents the Sadducee position as opposed to the Pharisee.

The author is "the Hebrew Lao Tse."

Like a Buddhist, he recognizes that life is inseparable from suffering, and advocates detachment from desire, and the pleasures of "ordinary mind."

1

Three problems about this book particularly fascinate me. First, what we have of the author is not a proper name but a title. The book begins by calling itself "The words of Qoheleth, son of David, king in Jerusalem." This points obviously to David's son Solomon, and as The Song of Songs was traditionally held to be the creation of King Solomon's lusty youth and the Book of Proverbs that of his prudent maturity, so Ecclesiastes was believed to be the product of a bitter old age in which Solomon foresaw that his kingdom would come to ruin under his rash son Jereboam. Medieval scholars debated whether Solomon should be seen as the wisest of men seeking further wisdom, or as a monarch whose corruption cost his realm. But scholars today agree that none of the books attributed to Solomon could have been written by him and that Ecclesiastes is a work of wisdom literature influenced by Hellenistic culture, composed probably in the third century B.C.E., half a millennium after the monarch's lifetime. But the persona of "Qoheleth" remains a mystery. How, in the first place, should the name be translated?

The noun Qoheleth appears nowhere else in the Bible. It derives from a Hebrew term meaning "assembly" or "gathering," and so may mean "one who addresses an assembly." Ecclesiastes, the Greek translation which is the title used in all standard English translations including Jewish ones, is unsuitably Christian. Nothing about this text implies an institutional church, still less a priest. Qoheleth might mean one who collects sayings, or gathers wisdom, hence the King James usage "the Preacher." Some translations call him "the Teacher." Both terms misleadingly suggest a degree of consistency, objectivity and solidity of thought and emotion which the text fails to sustain.

Yet another suggestion is that the book should be called "The Testimony of Solomon," capturing the possible legal and religious connotations of assembly, but this seems excessively formal for the author's exclamatory and spiky style. Besides, "testimony" is a distinctly masculine term (a cognate is testicles; men covered their testicles with their right hand when taking an oath, before courts had testaments to swear on), while Qoheleth is a feminine noun in its form-for reasons no scholarship explains.2 But remembering how often the author speaks of seeing, and how his favorite phrases include "I saw under the sun" and "I said in my heart," I would like to call the author the Witness. I think here of Paul Celan's question "Who will bear witness for the witness?" and of what today we name, after the cascade of horrors in the twentieth century, the poetry of witness.

A second problem is the famous refrain. "Vanity of vanities" echoes through centuries of English literature and speech. Samuel Johnson's "The Vanity of Human Wishes" depends on the phrase, as does the opening of Robert Browning's "The Bishop Orders His Tomb," "Vanity, saith the Preacher, vanity"; the phrase gives us Tom Wolfe's novel The Bonfire of the Vanities, and is the understood missing part of a volume of poems by Robert Hass, entitled Human Wishes.