Ecclesiastes

Allen Ng

June 6, 2011

Did Solomon write Ecclesiastes?

            According to tradition, Solomon wrote Ecclesiastes; however, through literary analysis of textual evidence and analysis of archeological findings this assertion is proven otherwise.

The structure of Ecclesiastes is separated into three sections, the opening, the thoughts, and the closing.  Both the opening and the closing of the book Ecclesiastes is in third person perspective, establishing an editor, who much latter added to the text (Coogan 481). 

This editor introduces Koheleth, as “son of David, king in Jerusalem” (Ecc. 1:1).  Assuming Koheleth is Solomon is a hasty generalization fallacy, because according to Adele Berlin and Marc Zvi Brettler, editors of the Jewish Study Bible, “nowhere in the book of Ecclesiastes is Solomon’s name mentioned; conversely, Koheleth does not occur elsewhere in the Bible [either]” (JSB 1604-1605).  The name Koheleth is derived from a Hebrew root, “to assemble”. During the Septuagint in third century BCE, Greek scribes translated this Hebrew root to “Ecclesiastes: the one of the assembly”.

            The oldest surviving manuscript of Ecclesiastes is that of one Dead Sea Scroll.   The Dead Sea Scrolls are copies of biblical text that are dated back the mid-second century BCE, concluding that the original book of Ecclesiastes must have been written prior to the second century BCE  (Coogan 482).  After much analysis, linguistic scholars discover two Persian words within Ecclesiastes “Parades [meaning] ‘grove’ {Ecc. 2:5} and Pitgam [meaning] ‘sentence’ {Ecc. 8.11}” (JSB 1605).  These findings narrow the origin of Ecclesiastes to be after the emergence of the Achaemenid Persian Empire in the sixth century BCE (JSB 1605) and are textual evidences showing that Solomon, who lived in the tenth century BCE, could not have written the book of Ecclesiastes.