Kohelet – Hebrew or Hellenist? A Survey of the Debate

Introduction:

Ecclesiastes ¹ is an unusual book, even by the lofty standards of the Hebrew scriptures. Its contents reflect a vocabulary, an attitude, and a worldview that is without close parallel in ancient Israel. Although written in Hebrew and conformant to some of the beliefs and conventions of other biblical books, Ecclesiastes appears to delight in its iconoclastic worldview, its quasi-nihilistic mood, and its morbid certainty of the ephemerality of all that humans hold dear. Such an unusual viewpoint has led to a host of speculation regarding its author. Who was he? What was his geographic and socioeconomic background? What were his circumambient intellectual, cultural, and religious influences? Was he an insider fomenting insurrection or an outsider criticising a flawed religious framework? Above all, are there any clues within the book itself that could help the reader understand more about its elusive and tantalising author?

This essay seeks to address one prominent twig within this nest of questions, namely, the debate regarding Kohelet’s philosophical influences. Specifically, it shall explore the possibility of Kohelet being influenced by the Greek philosophical, literary, and religious ideas that were enjoying currency in Judea during his lifetime. Sandwiched between two prominent centres of Hellenistic culture – Egypt and Syria – it is almost certain that an educated, wisdom-formulating, universalistically-oriented Judean such as Kohelet will have enjoyed some measure of exposure to the regnant ideas and attitudes wafting in from the dominant cultural hubs of the Ancient Near East. ² The question that has exercised scholars over the past two centuries is whether Greek ideas, which likely began to seep into ancient Judea after the Greek invasion in the late fourth Century, influenced Kohelet in any significant or discernible way. Intriguingly, the spectrum of opinion is about as wide as could possibly be. There are those who are convinced that Kohelet is essentially a Greek philosopher and rhetorician – with intellectual roots in the writings of Heraclitus, Euripides, Aristotle, Hesiod, Theognis, Aeschylus, Epicurus, and Zeno – who happened to write in an Israelite idiom. Conversely, there are those who dismiss such claims as fanciful, positing instead that Kohelet was an unmistakably Hebraic thinker, whose ideas and concerns – even if aware of other schools of thought – were entirely indigenous to his native traditions. This essay shall survey the full extent of this scholarly debate, paying close attention to the provenance, depth, and merit of all sides.

This essay shall proceed through the following stages. Prior to adjudicating the question of Greek provenance, we shall briefly survey the three other sources of influence proffered as possibilities by modern scholars. The first, of course, is the Israelite tradition itself, as reflected in the biblical works written before Ecclesiastes. We shall consider the extent to which Kohelet adhered to, and the extent to which he diverged from, traditional biblical beliefs. We shall proceed to survey the writings of those who posit Egyptian and Mesopotamian literature as potential sources of influence for Kohelet, as well as the reasons for their general dismissal by the scholarly consensus. Finally, we shall survey the expansive and contentious debate regarding the possibility of Greek influence, examining the claims of those who affirm and deny the plausibility of this suggestion – as well as those who defend some form of intermediate position.

However, before embarking, it may be methodologically desirable to lay out some of the assumptions upon which this essay – as with much of the scholarly literature on this subject – is founded. This essay shall assume, along with the general consensus among contemporary scholars, that the book of Ecclesiastes generally records the words of a single, if conflicted individual, along with perhaps a few outlying interpolations by later editors. ³ Although once fashionable to identify the fingerprints of numerous initial authors and meddlesome editors within this book, this trend has largely given way to a view that emphasises the ideational and temperamental unity of this work. ⁴ Indeed, considering the content of the book, it appears eminently reasonable to flatten some of the contradictions through conceiving of Kohelet as an ironic, dialectical, dialogical, and self-conflicted author. The second assumption of this essay concerns the book’s dating, upon which there is a fairly broad spectrum of plausible opinion. A minority have claimed this book for the Persian Era, with James Kugel ⁵ (citing the book’s economic stability and linguistic chaos) and C.L. Seow ⁶ (citing various socioeconomic factors) dating it to approximately the fifth century BCE. Others, such as Whitley, ⁷ citing certain salient linguistic and philosophical attributes, have placed this book in the middle of the second century BCE, after the Maccabean revolt. However, this essay shall follow the majority scholarly opinion, based upon a wide range of factors, that places the book in the period of the Ptolemaic era (ca. 319–200 BCE). ⁸ This dating allows for the possibility, but not the certainty, that Hellenistic ideas had already become common intellectual currency among the Judean intelligentsia, thereby lending at least theoretical credence to those who posit a Greek background to Kohelet’s worldview. Finally, this essay shall reject the generally marginal and discredited theories concerning this book, including the suggestions that Ecclesiastes was translated into Hebrew from Aramaic, that it was composed in one of the Phoenecian cities, or that Kohelet actually lived in Alexandria. As Hengel has pointed out, ⁹ too many of the details – physical, linguistic, and ideological – confirm an unmistakably Judean, Jerusalemite author. Armed with the well-buttressed assumptions that Kohelet was one individual, most likely living in the Jerusalem area around the third Century BCE, we are in a position to mine his text in the hope of tracing his philosophical influences.

Semitic Influences

Before casting our eyes westwards towards the Aegean, we shall have occasion to search for Kohelet’s philosophical background closer to home. To a certain degree, of course, Kohelet’s worldview falls squarely within the religious cosmos reflected by the texts and ideas of the earlier works of the Hebrew bible, ¹⁰ a good deal of which (the precise extent is unclear) would have been available to him during his lifetime. His language and idiom, in the main, belong to this literary tradition, albeit as a late iteration. He believes in one God, whom he calls “Elohim”, who created the world with immense power and perfect competency (3:11). Man’s life is entirely directed by this God (3:13), whom human beings ought to fear and respect (3:14). God’s absolute distance and transcendence is repeatedly affirmed (5:1), as is his ultimate power (6:10). Kohelet, despite his eeyorish exasperation with the ways of the world, never indulges in any Job-like fulminations against God. The deity is given a wide berth throughout, as life itself is perceived as a divine gift (3:13). Interestingly, there are numerous thematic and stylistic parallels between Ecclesiastes and the first eleven chapters of Genesis. For instance, Kohelet speaks of exiting naked from the womb (5:14, closely mirroring Genesis 3:17-19), and asserts that mankind stems from dust, and shall thence return (3:20, repeating almost verbatim Genesis 2:7). ¹¹ Such characteristics reflect Kohelet’s underlying fealty to, and affinity with, the religious worldview in which he was raised.

However, despite all these seemingly conventional attributes, Ecclesiastes remains a significant outlier within the Hebrew canon. There is a complete absence of any tribal, national, or local elements that suffuse, even dominate, most other biblical works. There are no historical references, no allusions to the chosen people, the promised land, or – aside from the epilogist’s rather brusque intrusion – references to the commandments and customs of the Torah. God himself is also thoroughly transformed, entirely deprived of any anthropomorphic elements (including speech, emotion, or expectation) so favoured by other biblical writers. God here is depicted as a distant, unresponsive, universal “Elohim” – a far cry from “YHWH”, the personal God of the patriarchs, the Israelite nation, or the ‘Lord of the Hosts’. There is also a conspicuous absence of signs or miracles. It may well be argued that God, under such a description, seems little more than a synonym for the workings of an inexorable and all-encompassing natural order. Most saliently, Kohelet’s unstinting insistence that all human life is ephemeral, that the righteous and the wicked do not receive any recompense for their actions in this world, and that all human life terminates in ignominious death, quite clearly contravenes the far more optimistic and meaning-oriented thrust of earlier biblical ideologies. Finally, as Fox notes, ¹² Kohelet’s epistemology also represents a profound shift in biblical thought, in the sense that it is self-reliant. His sources of knowledge are primarily his own empirical observations and logical deductions, leaving precious little room for traditional theology or wisdom. Having claimed to have gone further than any sage before him (1:16), it is personal reflections and conscience that are his guides. Kohelet is the first biblical sage to commune not with God, but with his own heart.

Do such factors place Ecclesiastes beyond the pale of traditional ideas and ideals found in the Hebrew bible? Is he to be viewed as an entirely new branch of Judaic thought, or merely a novel yet autochthonous outgrowth? This is a difficult question to answer. It is certainly true that Koheleth’s ideas appear to diverge sharply from earlier works, which would account for its bumpy and controversial path to canonisation. However, it seems most plausible to conclude, as Whybray does, ¹³ that the religious world of the late Old Testament period was one of great religious creativity and diversity, whose boundaries were significantly more expansive than later interpreters would have allowed. Koheleth, with all his apparent iconoclasm, occupies a place within this spectrum, a skeptical insider as opposed to a critical outsider. Nonetheless, the question still remains as to why he saw fit to entertain these innovative religious trends. Which texts had he read, to which currents of thought had he been exposed, that enabled him to construct this worldview?

A vocal minority of scholars have seen fit to trace Kohelet’s worldview to currents of thought originating from around the Meditteranean basin. Loretz, ¹⁴ for instance, argues that this book is thoroughly Semitic in its orientation, rooted primarily in Mesopotamian antecedents. Rejecting any Greek or Egyptian connections, he sees Kohelet’s worldview – especially regarding the ephemerality of human life – as foreshadowed by passages from the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Babylonian Theodicy, both of whose contents had travelled across the Ancient Near East by the third century BCE. Seow, ¹⁵ who dates Kohelet to the centuries prior to the Hellenisation of Judea, agrees with much of this analysis, adding that the strong parallels found between Kohelet and the Proverbs of Ahiqar obviate the need to draw a connection with later Greek ideas. G.A. Barton ¹⁶ takes this Babylonian connection a stage further, claiming that Koheleth’s influences are semitic in their entirety. He posits that one of Koheleth’s most hedonistic textual units (9:7-10) is so obviously copied from a passage in Gilgamesh (Tablet III) that it may even constitute a direct hebraic translation of that text. ¹⁷ For Barton, any incidental connection between Kohelet and Greek philosophy may be entirely explained by their common exposure to these Mesopotamian ideological trends. In this claim he is joined by Mcneil, ¹⁸ who recognised the Stoic elements in Kohelet, yet traced this commonality to earlier ideas stemming from Phoenicia, the birthplace of Zeno and a point of cultural interaction with Israelite sages.

Other scholars have turned their attention southwards, claiming that Ecclesiastes’ worldview is better explained through parallels with Egyptian texts and ideas. Humbert ¹⁹ has marshalled a wide array of sources in defence of this thesis. In his view, only a late Egyptian milieu could satisfactorily account for Kohelet’s royal pretentions, dialogical presentation, carpe diem mentality, and his reference to opulent societal phenomena such as female entertainers (2:8). Gemser, ²⁰ in his study of the Instruction of Onchsheshonqy, notes that Kohelet’s laments concerning the futile nature of man’s frenzied activities are best explained against the background of these Egyptian maxims, which were also composed during the Ptolemaic era. Fischer ²¹ bolsters this case by drawing parallels between Kohelet and a series of funerary poems known as ‘Harper’s Songs’, stating that the former’s inveterate skepticism and preference for the certainty of existence over the uncertainty of death was derived from the writings of the latter.

While such ideas of Babylonian and Egyptian influence have clearly gained a measure of scholarly traction, they have manifestly failed to persuade most authorities. Both theories have been subjected to stinging – and to my mind compelling – criticism. Some have pointed out the large time lags between Kohelet and the composition and circulation of the Babylonian and Egyptian sources upon which he ostensibly relies, as well as the unlikelihood of Kohelet having the linguistic skills to engage with such texts. ²² Others have pointed out that these supposed influences are rather broad and vague, constituting the sort of more general observations and attitudes that were likely to arise among intelligent, skeptical men pondering the same set of existential problems in different parts of the Ancient Near East. ²³ In addition, many of the intellectual trends of Ptolemaic Egypt most likely stemmed from a host of other sources, primarily Greek and Babylonian, relegating their role in the formation Kohelet’s wordview, if such a role existed at all, to that of a cultural courier. ²⁴ Finally, one might well point out that, seeing as Kohelet’s era and locale was under the direct rule of a Hellenistic kingdom, the possibility of a direct Greek influence – whose intellectual traditions had certainly been enriched through a process of cultural cross-pollination with numerous significant centres of civilisation – is the far likelier option. It is to this possibility that our attention now turns.

Greek Influence

The likeliest (and most contentious) of all these possibilities is the claim that Kohelet’s worldview was shaped by, and in large part reflective of, the regnant Greek philosophical, literary, and religious zeitgeist. This claim is hardly new; within the realm of modern scholarship, it was first advanced by Zirkel in 1792, and repeated, if in rudimentary form, by early scholars such as Graetz, Siegfried, Wildeboer, Levy and Allgeier. ²⁵ Since the turn of the twentieth century, this topic has snared the attention of a wide array of scholars, who have extruded copious amounts of ink in the defence or dismissal of this thesis. This section of the essay shall attempt a comprehensive, although not exhaustive, survey of this material, and will proceed to divide scholarly opinion into the following five categories.

Before delving into the minutiae of these five categories, it is instructive to note the points upon which scholars generally agree. First, there is general agreement that the extent of Hellenisation during the third century BCE, the likely date of Kohelet’s composition, remains somewhat obfuscated and open to debate. It is certainly clear that, by the middle of the Second Century, the process of Hellenisation amongst the Judean literati was in full swing, and constituted an important cause of the Kulturkampf surrounding the rise and development of the Hasmonean dynasty. But was this the case a century earlier? According to many scholars, ²⁶ our information is simply too scanty to make any definite assertions. ²⁷ It is precisely this historiographical vacuum which allows for different points of view concerning the question at hand.

Importantly, there is also a universal avoidance of the two logical extremes of this debate. On the one hand, every scholar admits that an individual as literate and worldly as Kohelet would have experienced at least some form of basic interaction with some elements of the cultural zeitgeist, which included Greek thought. Indeed, it would have been virtually impossible for an educated Judean of his period to avoid it. The question only remains as to whether such cultural interactions shaped Kohelet’s own distinctive weltanschauung. On the other hand, not a single scholar, so far as can be seen, claims that Kohelet was a strict disciple of a specific school or thinker within the Greek philosophical tradition. His writings are simply too unique, and are stained by the fingerprints of too many schools, ideas, and moods. It is precisely Kohelet’s resistance to any form of domestication that has provided the ammunition for this unending scholarly debate.

The first category of scholars believe that the book of Ecclesiastes owes the lion’s share of its ideas to various strands of Greek philosophy and literature, and reflects this influence in almost every verse. The first member of this coterie was Plumptre, ²⁸ who already at the end of the nineteenth century claimed that Ecclesiastes was “absolutely saturated with Greek thought and language”. ²⁹ He had a rather romantic notion – long since discredited – that Kohelet was a resident of classical Alexandria, who filled his time there wandering about the great library, perusing old philosophical manuscripts and weaving their ideas into his own distinctive philosophy, which he decided to record in a Hebraic idiom. No less imaginative, although rather more textually based, is the portrait painted by Lohfink, ³⁰ who perceived Kohelet as a kind of itinerant scholar who travelled to all the great centres of Hellenistic culture, gaining novel insights and inspiration at every station. Kohelet – whose name in Hebrew is most plausibly rendered as “one who gathers people” – was a true marketplace philosopher, whose ideas echo the full gamut of the Greek literary pantheon: Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle, and the numerous schools. Moreover, Lohfink believed that the structure of Kohelet was that of a Greek palindrome (with a furious critique of conventional religion at its centre), whose literary form was that of a Stoic diatribe or Menippean satire. Kohelet, in this view, represented a pinnacle of the new Hellenistic trends sweeping Judea during the Ptolemaic era. While not impossible, the exotic biographical portraits offered by Plumptre and Lohfink stretch the boundaries of plausibility, thus undermining their overall theories.

A more grounded instance of this claim of comprehensive influence was proposed by Braun. ³¹ His analysis combs through the entire text of Ecclesiastes, linking many common themes and phrases to their Greek origins (primarily among the works of the great poets, such as Homer, Euripedes, Theognis, and Menander) with varying degrees of plausibility. To Braun’s mind, however, the most important influence of Greek thought upon Kohelet is revealed through the latter’s inveterate, ubiquitous pessimism. The cast-iron conviction that the world was headed towards a grim finality is what truly sets Kohelet apart from other Israelite sages, and it is this basic attitude that he owes to later currents of Greek philosophy. A similar claim of influence is advanced by Godbey, ³² who sees great significance in Kohelet’s gnomic and aphoristic style of philosophising. This style, he claims, closely resembles the earlier, more poetic Greek thinkers, not the elaborate systems of the latter schools and metaphysicians. The ceaseless rhythms of nature put forth by Heraclitus, the immutability and unknowability of being posited by Xenophanes, and the skepticism towards knowledge displayed by Empedocles all made a deep impression on the aspiring Hebraic thinker. Finally, and most ambitiously, Gobey claims that Aeschelus’ Prometheus, with its acceptance of fate and reorientation of significance away from the heavens and towards humanity, underwrites many of Kohelet’s basic attitudes. Perhaps the most extreme of all the scholars, Gobey ends his essay with the assertion that

“Every sentiment [in Kohelet] can be duplicated from Ionic philosophers and attic humanists. . . the hands are the hand of Esau, but the voice is the voice of Jacob.” ³³

Even for those who are unwilling to go quite this far, the purported findings of this group of ‘maximalist’ scholars – especially when unmoored from biographical fantasies – are sufficient to render the notion of ‘Kohelet the Greek thinker’ to be a plausible, if distant option.

A second group of scholars similarly read Kohelet as a product of Greek thought, yet take pains to narrow the influence down to one specific thinker or school. In Ranston’s view, ³⁴ Kohelet is best understood as an aphorist and poetical theologian, whose primary influence stemmed from Theognis of Megara, a Greek poet and philosopher active around the sixth century BCE. Much like Kohelet (1:16), Theognis claimed to have attained the pinnacle of wisdom, yet reached the conclusion that life is so futile and evanescent that it would have been best not to be born at all. Ranston sees echoes of this sentiment in Kohelet (4:2), where the dead are declared more fortunate than the living. More importantly, Theognis stressed that the root of man’s existential discombobulation is his inability to know the future actions or decisions of the gods, a lamentable fact that Kohelet (3:14) sees as the final seal upon man’s unhappy fate. Ranston, in an admirably cautious vein, admits that Kohelet’s knowledge of Theognis’ ideas was most likely not through direct interaction with the latter’s writings, but via more general intellectual currents.

Of all the theories linking Kohelet to various Greek schools and thinkers, none is so compelling, well-sourced, or bitterly contentious than the theory of Epicurean influence. The Epicurean school, famous for its advocacy of hedonism, atomistic materialism, and antipathy towards religion, spread with great speed and popularity throughout the Hellenistic world during the third and second centuries BCE. While no scholar is quite as bold as to classify Kohelet as a fully-fledged Epicurean, many have noted the inescapable similarities between these two systems of thought. Haupt ³⁵ was perhaps the first thinker to enthusiastically press this point. He sees the influence of Epicurus’ rather restrained and understated form of hedonism in Kohelet’s recommendations towards cheerfulness (9:7), companionship (4:9), pursuit gustatory pleasures (5:18, 8:15), as well as his warnings against the self-indulgence of immoderate eating (10:16-17).

More recently, Whitley ³⁶ has laid out a lengthy case for sustained interaction between Kohelet and Epicurean ideas. As noted before, one of the most jarring elements to Kohelet’s worldview is his understanding of God as distant, unreachable, even incommunicado. God is in the heavens and man is on the earth (5:1), to the extent that even the wisest of men cannot fathom God’s actions (8:17). This, claims Whitley, is a close mirroring of Epicurean theology, which does not admit of any possible understanding, communication, or connection with any gods (should they exist at all). This belief entails an absolute denial of prophecy both in theory and in practice – hence Kohelet’s categorical denial that humans can have reliable insights into upcoming events (8:6-8). An even more remarkable Epicurean element is visible in Kohelet’s understanding of death, which is understood to be the inescapable and irretrievable end to a person’s life. A common fate awaits both man and beast (3:18-21), whose bodies and animating spirits alike perish on that fateful day, descending to a place of unrelieved gloom (11:8). That the answer – however fitful and partial – to the depressing fact of human mortality might be sought in eating, drinking, and revelling in the evanescent enjoyment of physical pleasure is a notion that no Hebraic thinker prior to Epicurus could have conceivably entertained. Unfortunately, Whitley’s claim of extensive Epicurean interaction is predicated upon a historical placing that almost no other scholar adopts. He views this Epicurean trend within ancient Judea as a consequence of the reign of Antiochus Epiphanes (175-164 BCE), himself a committed and apparently evangelical Epicurean. Whitley, also noting the linguistic proximity between Ecclesiastes and Mishnaic Hebrew, dates this book to the middle decades of the second century CE, after the Maccabean revolt and the composition of Ben Sira, to an epoch in which Hellenistic ideas had undoubtedly percolated throughout the Judean intellectual classes. Most scholars, noting the complete absence of war or strife in Kohelet’s writings, reject this later dating – thus casting a fair measure of doubt upon Whitley’s entire analytical edifice.

The Stoic school, founded in the early third century by Zeno of Citium, is another philosophical school frequently associated with Kohelet’s writings. While none of the original writings of this school are extant, many of their ideas were preserved in the form of quotes and attributions by later admirers, principally Marcus Cicero and Diogenes Laertius. According to Gammie, ³⁷ Kohelet’s interaction with the Stoic school was thorough and extensive, although not entirely positive. On the one hand, many of Kohelet’s ideas closely mirror Stoic views. The Hebraic sage posits a deterministic, fatalistic understanding of man’s destiny, in which the actions of God – or fate – were inexorable (7:13), yet nonetheless admits the possibility of a human agency within that system. Kohelet, following Stoic precedent, also draws a sharp dichotomy between the foolish and the wise. One of the great virtues of the latter, for the stoics, is their ability to act in an appropriate and timely manner, which Gammie sees as the ideological impetus behind the famous poem (3:1-8) in which Kohelet posits a correct ‘season’ for every action. Interestingly, Gammie understands Kohelet as something of a paradoxical creature – a rebellious Stoic, whose writings exhibit a purposeful rejection of some of this school’s core tenets. Put simply, Kohelet was far too skeptical and subversive a thinker to be taken in by any false comforts. Thus, while the Stoics believed that a person may hope to live on after death through the celebration of their good name, Kohelet explicitly rejects the possibility of anyone being remembered after their own extinction (9:5). While the Stoics taught that personally disastrous events may be recast as ‘good’ through understanding the world sub specie aeternitatis, Kohelet forestalls any such understanding by declaring the processes of the world to be fundamentally opaque (3:11). Finally, while the Stoics preached the acceptance of the common fate of all flesh, Kohelet – who, after all, was weaned in the Israelite religious traditions – expresses outrage that the foolish and wise could be subject to the same ignominious end (2:14-17). Thus, in Gammie’s view, Koheleth bore the mark of one particular philosophical school, from which he was nourished and against which he strove. This view has a ring of plausibility to it, as it both admits Kohelet’s wide philosophical education, yet allows space for his manifestly contrarian and unruly intellectual tendencies.

A third category of scholars rejects the influence of any specific Greek school or thinker upon the thought of Kohelet, yet maintains that certain nascent cultural and intellectual trends in the third century BCE account for our author’s ideational and temperamental divergence from his Israelite forebears. Hengel, ³⁸ in particular, sees the book of Kohelet as the most manifestly Greek of all the books of the Hebrew Bible, yet rejects all previous attempts to pin down specific influences. Far from depicting Kohelet as some kind of seasoned traveller or transcultural philosopher, he finds it more plausible to suggest that a wide array of foreign ideas were being transmitted into Judean society via the steady stream of foreign soldiers, merchants, and government officials who passed through Jerusalem area during the Ptolemaic reign. This new Hellenistic intellectual spirit manifested itself in numerous ways throughout Kohelet’s writing, as he overtly rejects many of the earlier assumptions and foundations of the traditional Israelite religious order. The most salient example of this is Kohelet’s shattering of the ‘deed-action consequence’ – the essentially theological belief that a person’s conduct will determine his outcome – in favour of a model of history and nature that underscores the irreducible inexplicability of God’s actions. This fatalistic doctrine, according to Hengel, had been introduced into ancient Greek thought by the fifth century philosopher Thrasymachus, was subsequently popularised by Euripides, and was finally introduced by Kohelet into the annals of Hebraic ideas. Kohelet, in this view, comes across as a deeply conflicted figure, who occupies an uncertain position at the crossroads of multiple intellectual traditions. While his own critical faculties, along with his exposure to Hellenistic thought, no longer permitted him to accept wholesale the idyllic theology of his patrimonial faith, he steadfastly refused to abandon many of its core tenets. Ecclesiastes, therefore, is the opening salvo of an East-West Kulturkampf within Judaism that has continued unabated to this day.

Adopting a similar approach, Adams ³⁹ understands Kohelet’s innovative rhetorical techniques and underlying fatalism to be a product of a new Hellenistic spirit taking root throughout the territories conquered by the Greek forces. While not rejecting the ‘schools’ approach out of hand, Adams believes that we ought not overstate the importance of these proposed influences. It is far likelier that Kohelet was an original thinker, unabashedly mixing a broad spectrum of ideas, both novel and ancient, into his own unique ideological blend. While Adams does view Kohelet within a broader context of a more international wisdom tradition, he also asserts that Greek philosophical ideas were the most culturally immediate and thus most likely to shape Kohelets worldview. This influence is most readily apparent in Kohelet’s trenchant opposition to the notion of astral immortality, or the ascent of righteous souls into a heavenly abode. This view had already gained credence within Greek philosophy, appearing both in Platonic dialogues (such as Timaeus, Phaedo, and Republic) and in the works of Aristophanes. By the middle of the second temple era, this belief had found a home within Judean texts: Enoch (1En., 22) speaks of the ‘soul of a dead man’, Daniel (12:2–3) declares that the souls of the deceased either enjoy everlasting life or permanent shame, and Jubilees (23:30) celebrates those righteous ones who will rise up and rejoice forever. ⁴⁰ This belief, Greek in its origin, was firmly repudiated by a memorable pericope in Ecclesiastes (3:16-22), which lampoons those who assert that a person’s spirit ‘rises’ after death. Thus, in Adams’ view, Kohelet’s most important interaction with Hellenistic ideas is actually through his repudiation of this newfangled notion of spiritual immortality. While hardly going so far as to call Kohelet a conservative thinker, this observation does call into question the image of Kohelet as an incorrigible iconoclast. Perhaps Ecclesiastes functions, to some small degree, as a rearguard defence against Hellenistic encroachments.

A fourth, smaller category of scholars understands Kohelet as reflecting some influence of Greek ideas, but maintains that these ideas are far from central or formative to his worldview. Perhaps the only unambiguous example of such a view is Hertzberg, ⁴¹ who remains largely unconvinced by either side’s arguments. While admitting that Ecclesiastes does give the impression of an acquaintance with Theognis, as well as elements of Stoic and Epicurean thought, neither the form nor the content of the book show any literary dependence upon these external intellectual traditions. They constitute a kind of vague background, upon which the author superimposes his own more colourful worldview. Considering the extent to which Kohelet diverges from mainstream Hebraic thought, and considering the furore that his writings have occasioned amongst ancient exegetes and modern scholars alike, this rather tepid view stands as perhaps the least convincing of all.

The fifth and final category of scholars include those who firmly repudiate the notion that Greek ideas constituted a formative element of Kohelet’s worldview. The reasons for such rejections are broad, creative, and diverse. Seow, ⁴² for instance, noted the remarkable absence of Greek loanwords or linguistic constructions within Ecclesiastes. This datum, in his eyes, is conclusive evidence of both a Persian date for this book, and its concomitant lack of exposure to any Greek thought. Whybray, ⁴³ by contrast, bases his rejection upon the sheer proliferation of possibilities that have been suggested as potential Greek influences. Such suggestions have been so extraordinarily diverse that one cannot help wondering whether they reveal far more about the over-educated enthusiasm of the commentator than about the intellectual possibilities open to a Judean sage. Moreover, if an author had indeed been subject to such a wide array of influences, he would have doubtlessly produced a most confused work, replete with half-baked ideas and ideological inconsistencies. This is manifestly not the case. Despite some internal tensions, the book of Ecclesiastes advocates a consistent and readily identifiable worldview, thus undermining the notion of innumerable avenues of influence. While admitting that certain elements of Kohelet’s presentational style – his acerbity, his iconoclasticism, his introspection – may be influenced by non-Hebraic trends, Whybray nonetheless maintains that the content of the book constitutes a purely internal Hebraic critique of traditional Israelite ideas.

No scholar has been as zealous in defending Kohelet’s individuality, creativity, and intellectual independence as the redoubtable Robert Gordis. ⁴⁴ His fundamental thesis perceives Kohelet as a true sui generis, a brilliant Judean thinker whose subversive yet faithful addition to the Hebrew canon opened new vistas of thought within the Judaic faith. In the service of defending Kohelet’s self-reliance, Gordis considers, disparages, and dispatches all proposed claims of Greek influence. Stoic influence? Kohelet diverges on far too many important topics, such as the knowledge of future events and the beneficent intentions of God. Epicurean echoes? Unlikely, as Kohelet posits a deterministic world, and does not unambiguously deny the immortality of the soul. ⁴⁵ Aristotelian parallels? Well, seeing as the idea of the Golden Mean is a fairly universal notion, there is no need to invoke the Stagirite’s influence. Stylistic similarities to the Greek diatribe? Perhaps, but such literary techniques were common across the Ancient Near East, and require no familiarity with Greek literature. Ultimately, Gordis believes the Greek connection to have been comprehensively disproven. All apparent similarities may be dismissed as coincidental, or as the inevitable result of intelligent men carefully investigating the same philosophical themes. For Gordis, what is most striking about Kohelet is the sheer untraceability of his worldview. It fits comfortably into no known school or tradition – whether Greek, Hebrew, Egyptian, or Babylonian. Kohelet was, as far as can be told, a truly independent thinker. It is precisely this independence that commands our enduring fascination.

Conclusions

Such a survey of opinions does not readily lend itself to neat conclusions. It seems plain that both sides of the debate have strong arguments in favour of their own positions, and perhaps even stronger arguments against those of their opponents. The result of such a debate is that it becomes far easier to identify Kohelet through negation, through identifying precisely what he was not. He was not a faithful disciple of any Greek school, nor overwhelmingly influenced by any one particular thinker. Moreover, he was far too loyal to Hebraist sensibilities to be fully comfortable in a religious milieu in which the gods were perceived as cruel, capricious, megalomaniacal, or functionally irrelevant. By contrast, he was far too intellectually subversive and temperamentally contrarian to be considered a true heir of the priestly and prophetic authors of the earlier biblical books. He is not conventionally religious, yet his general obeisance towards his patrimonial deity sets him apart from many prominent philosophical schools. He is not quite a nihilist, neither quite a pragmatist, and certainly far from an optimist. He does not set Hebraic and Hellenistic thought at odds with one another, yet neither does he attempt to reach a synthesis between the two. He is manifestly not a forerunner to either Elisha ben Abuyah or Philo of Alexandria. Having surveyed the scholarly landscape, one is forced to admit that even after two millennia of commentary and dissection, Kohelet remains an enigma.

With regards to the merits of the scholarly opinions discussed above, it appears that neither side can claim unalloyed victory. On the one hand, one can admit great sympathy for Whybray’s insistence that the careful scholar ought to avoid “parallelomania”, ⁴⁶ as well as his observation that, unless one can show sustained parallels or direct quotations, the likelihood for coincidence in such cases as these is great indeed. This argument seems sufficiently powerful to remove the option of perceiving Kohelet’s writings as a veritable smorgasbord of variegated Greek influences. On the other hand, the arguments in favour of the influence of Epicureanism, and to a lesser extent Stoicism, appear well-grounded and compelling. Kohelet’s agonised reflections appear to be wrestling with an ideological onslaught that reoriented his entire worldview, forcing him to address a series of concerns brought up by the proponents of these two philosophical schools, or something very much like them. The relevant textual evidence, taken together with the swift spread of Epicurean schools, the introduction of Hellenism into Judea in the wake of the Ptolemaic conquest, and Judea’s geographical placement as a trading route between major centres of Hellenistic cultural activity, lends historical weight to this conclusion.

This does not, of course, detract anything from Kohelet as a thinker or writer. If indeed he was exposed to Epicurean and Stoic ideas, he may be commended for his judicious navigation of these intellectual currents, as well as the self-reliance he displays in rejecting core components of these worldviews. Regardless of influence, his book remains utterly untameable. Its idiosyncratic worldview must be considered the unique synthesis of a fertile philosophical mind, whose non-parochial vantage point and palpable world-weariness reflects a life saturated with great texts, arguments, and experiences. It is precisely the reflections of this inimitable mind that have granted Kohelet, somewhat ironically, a measure of immortality.