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| Ecclesiastes Re: Execution Carried Out (845397) | |||
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Ecclesiastes Re: Execution Carried Out |
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Posted by Kew Gardens Teleport on Thu Sep 22 06:55:35 2011, in response to Re: Execution Carried Out, posted by Olog-hai on Wed Sep 21 20:21:59 2011. He was King Solomon, actually.LOL. Qoheleth certainly tries to make people believe he was Solomon. Of course he tries a little too hard in places (2:9 is pretty obviously written by someone who has read historical/legendary accounts about Solomon and rendered them into the first person). Virtually no-one has seriously believed that Ecclesiastes was written by Solomon since at least the 16th century (it's one of those blindingly obvious things that it took having someone as unpleasant as Martin Luther to mention publicly). R.B.Y. Scott said it best: claiming that Ecclesiastes was written by Solomon is "like claiming that a book about Marxism in modern English idiom and spelling was written by Henry VIII". I say "virtually no-one", because over the 20th century a certain strand of idiotically naïve Biblical literalism has arisen in American Protestantism that wants to stick its fingers in its ears and go "la la la" at anything that contradicts their world view. This most commonly manifests itself as Young Earth Creationism, but it also often includes a complete rejection of Biblical scholarship in general and the historical-critical method in particular, even in cases that are so clear-cut as Ecclesiastes. So, actually, Ecclesiastes was written by an unknown person, probably in the 3rd century. It's unlikely to have been written after 200, because three fragments of Ecclesiastes were found in Qumran cave IV, which have been palaeographically dated to the mid-2nd century, and because of the huge number of parallels between Ecclesiastes and Ecclesiasticus (aka Sirach or Ben Sira; which we can date to 196-175), which are usually taken as being strongly suggestive of Ben Sira having access to a copy of Qoheleth. It is just about tenable to suggest a 4th (e.g. Choon-Leong Seow) or 5th (e.g. William P. Brown) century date, but this does tend to look either like a scholarly being awkward for the hell of it or like a pathetic attempt to mitigate Qoheleth's dishonesty by reducing the number of years' separation from the time of Solomon. |
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