In the interest of a catchy title, I decided to call this lecture, with apologies to the fine Spanish composer Manuel de Falla, the Three Hatted Corn. Three hatted corner might be better, but that wouldn't make sense. I was asked if I meant that Kohelet wore three hats. This is a reasonable question, but actually I was thinking of the reader rather than the writer, whoever he or she might have been, since I for one find it possible to read the book wearing one of three hats. The first is that of the preacher, an appropriate hat since an alternative name of the book in the King James' version is "The Preacher". I had occasion to read the book wearing this hat just recently when I gave an address in Philadelphia in the old Sephardic congrega tion where the preachers and precentors wear this archaic headgear as a badge of their office. I selected the following verses from chapter four:
And I returned and saw all the oppresions that are done under the sun; and behold the tear of the oppressed who have no comforter; and in the hand of their oppressors there is power, and they have no comforter...Better is a poor, wise lad than a foolish old ruler who no longer knows how to be admonished. For from the prison house he went out to rule, yet in his dominion he was born poor.
This is a beautiful, musical passage. Its precise meaning is not clear, although Joseph who was imprisoned and later became viceroy is a good candidate for identification as the poor, wise lad. Many alternative suggestions have been made, and one modern commentator remarks that one thing that they all share is a lack of certainty. This lack of certainty is a thread that runs through all studies of the book and the author, and of course is a great opportunity for the preacher. I used it as a peg on which to hang a discourse on the new President of Czechoslovakia who fits the role in an uncanny way. This man shed many tears over oppression, spent years in jail and was taken from the jailhouse to the presidential palace. Kohelet has a way with his vague, sonorous, portentous utterances of provoking thought and wonder. He is elliptic and enigmatic, teasing and tempting. You can readily hang your own thoughts on his words, and many have been those who have taken advantage of this and used him as a vehicle to drive along the highways and byways of their own minds. Accordingly you can read Kohelet with total self-confidence. If you don't understand it fully, if you can't really make up your mind what he is trying to say, don't worry, you are in good company. So the preacher can have a good time with the Preacher, if we accept the King James translation of Kohelet , itself far from certain, by the way, using Kohelet's words as a bearer of his or her own thoughts. And there is nothing wrong with that, so long as you do not kid yourself that you are saying the final word.
Another hat that might be worn is that of the observant Jew, and this hat will, I think, differ little from the one of the conservative Christian. Wearing this hat one ascertains that the book was composed by King Solomon who has Kohelet among his many pen-names. He wrote it simply to point out that his experiments in high living convinced him that it was not worth it, that the only smart thing to do is to fear God and keep his commandments, in short that this world is mere vanity, vanity of vanities in fact. Vanities are most often these days acquired from Sears Roebuck, but the word is archaic in its use here. It preserves the meaning of the Latin word emptiness, and vain and vanity came to be applied by the Puritans to the emptiness of women's application of cosmetics from a spiritual point of view, so it moved in meaning from emptiness to disguising or improving ones true looks. The word hevel which it translates means actually (puff) and the superlative havel havalim which he likes to use means the (puff)est (puff) you can imagine.
This traditional interpretation, namely that Solomon is the author, and the book is essentially religious, goes back long before the printed book, and spans the whole history of the printed book. The second book printed in Hebrew in the Holy Land was Moses Galante's commentary on Kohelet, published in Safed in 1578. Here I have a commentary on Kohelet published in Jerusalem in 1973 by the orthodox Rav Kook foundation, which takes also a traditional stance. Four hundred years separate these books in time, but in approach there is much common ground. The frontispiece of the kabbalist Galante's work declares:
It is a delightful commentary on the scroll of Kohelet, the words of which were self-contradictory, but the author by his good taste and depth has sorted the matter out, and set it upon a sure foundation, and apart from this brings for every verse the Zohar and its additions which are pleasanter than gold and much fine gold. He has done wondrously.
No false modesty there.
At this point it may be well to give a summary of the main topics of the book as they are summarized by Mordecai Zer-Kavod the author of the modern book I just mentioned. He offers a list of the following 12 topics:
The orthodox viewpoint agrees that Kohelet seems to contradict himself on occasion. At one moment he says that life is great, at another that it is a bit of a pain. At one moment he recommends spending your life joyfully with your dear wife, at another he declares that a woman can be more bitter than death itself. One modern commentator remarks that when he addresses this subject he has a twinkle in his eye, as though the research he did in coming to this conclusion was not entirely distasteful. But all these apparent contradictions can be reconciled. The Targum comments that Kohelet declares that there is nothing new under the sun. True, but this implies that above the sun, namely in the future beatific existence there will be many new things, all of them joyful and without the flip side that all earthly pleasures have so maddeningly. The author of the book is Solomon, who wrote the Song of Songs in youth, when a young man's fancy lightly turns to love, Proverbs in middle age when experience has been gained and vigor has not been lost, and Kohelet in old age, which has a bittersweet flavor, looking back to the joys of other days, not sufficiently appreciated at the time perhaps, and forward to the long home in mother Earth.
A rather beautiful summary of this attitude is given in a commentary on Kohelet which was published by David Frenkel and is ascribed to the great Saadia Gaon, whose books, the author of the Hovot Halevavot assures us "enlighten the intelligence, sharpen the understanding, instruct the simple and prod the laggard." Here are the five points that Kohelet stresses according to Saadiah's understanding of the book.
It's a beautiful recipe, Kohelet a la Saadia Gaon. It makes you wonder why anyone ever does anything different. I guess the Arab folktale has the answer. It says that Iblis, the devil comes to a man and says to him: "I want to sell you the world. It will give you much toil and little joy, it will cause you gnashing of teeth and disappointment." And man says: "I'll buy it." And Iblis says: "You know, you would be far better off if you refused." And man says: "No matter, give it to me." So Iblis gives him the world, and as he does so he says: "You got a bad bargain." Now there's an honest salesman for you.
Let us with some sadness take off the hat of the traditionalist, whether Christian or Jewish, and put on the hat of the scholar. And now we need not fear to ask: Who was Kohelet? Not Solomon, say most scholars. If Kohelet belongs to the time of Solomon, declares Cheyne, the Hebrew language has no history. We could as easily believe that Chaucer is the author of Rasselas, as that Solomon wrote Kohelet, says Ginsburg. The criterion here is linguistic. If a text in English implores you to gag me with a spoon, you know you are in the latter half of the 20th century, and probably in California. If a letter finishes politely "your obedient servant" you suspect that it has to be before the latter half of the 20th century. Style and usage are not an exact science, but they give distinct clues. Kohelet writes rather sub-standard standard Hebrew. He uses odd expressions and foreign-looking words. This suggests to scholars a late date. They also find a Greek feel about the book, not to suggest that this is a philo- sophical work, but that it probes and questions in a way unusual in Hebrew Literature, and common in Greek. This implies that the book was written subsequent to the incursion of that astonishing man Alexander of Macedon into the middle east, for he brought about the entry of Greek ideas into that part of the world. So his lifetime, around 300 BCE becomes the earliest that the book can be, and the fact that Ben Sira who lived around 180 BCE mentions it, makes that date the latest it can be, so we split the difference and come up with a date around 250 BCE. Some scholars suggest that the book was originally written in Aramaic rather than Hebrew, so the book we have is a translation. While this suggestion has some points in its favor, it has not been generally accepted. If this widely accepted view is correct, then Kohelet was probably a teacher, perhaps according to some, a teacher of the then equivalent of yuppies, well off and wondering what it is all about. Samuel Sandmel has an interesting point. He compares the author to a rather cantakerous individual sitting next to a cracker barrel, complaining, calling black white and white black. When everyone is convinced he is a rank heretic, he gets up and declares that he must get a good night's sleep so as to be ready for church bright and early the next morning. I guess we've met people like that, and Sandmel feels that Kohelet was one of them. Traditional Jewish sources were well aware of Kohelet's ambivalence. Talmud (Shabbat 30b) conveys a tradition in the name of no lesser an authority than Rav, the founder of the great Jewish academy in Sura, that the sages considered excluding the book of Kohelet from Holy Scripture, on account of its self-contradictory nature. But they concluded that since it begins with words of Torah and ends with words of Torah all was ok. It's interesting to observe that Rav was apparently in sympathy with the major trend of Kohelet's thought. The Talmud tells us that he said to R. Hamnuna: "My son, if you have it, do good to yourself, for there is no enjoyment in the grave, and death will not be long in coming. And if you say: 'I should like to leave something for my children,' who will tell you in the grave how they used it? For humans are like the grasses of the field, some blossom and some fade." (Eruvin 54a). Rav had probably never seen a mortar board or a yarmulke, but he seems to have been able to wear both with aplomb.
So much for hats. What about the corn? Well, I have to confess it. I haven't told you anything new or original. The self contradictory nature of the book is apparent, and how you respond to that seems to depend on what you bring to the book in the first place. And Kohelet either was Solomon or wasn't. If he was Solomon, then we know who he was. If he wasn't Solomon, his real name, life and background are a mystery. And it seems quite unlikely that any real advance will be made in solving the puzzles.
That, however, is a risky prophecy, because there have been some astonishing breakthroughs in recent years. The puzzle of the mysterious word pim which occurs once in the Bible and was already unknown to the Greek translators more than two thousand years ago, was solved when someone dug one up. And not only was one dug up, it had its name written right on it for everyone to see. It turned out to be a weight. It's hard to imagine a similar break- through that will shed light on this mysterious man, although I guess it is not totally impossible. However, in order that it shall not be said that I served you today corn and nothing else, appropriate though this may be on this Succot festival which celebrates the fruits of the earth, I would like to share with you some thoughts on the word Kohelet, in which I would claim there is some originality. My discussion may be a little technical, but I shall try to keep my line of reasoning clear. In addition, these are thoughts in process which you may be able to help shape, so if you find inaccuracies or inconsistencies, feel free to express yourself when I am through. There are two puzzles inherent in the word Kohelet. First, assuming the name has a meaning and is not simply an arbitrary name such as most of us have, it appears to have something to do with a root q-h-l which is supposed to mean "to assemble". Just what did Kohelet assemble? Does it have any connection with his book? Secondly, and this applies whether the name is arbitrary or not, the word is feminine. With Solomon having married a thousand wives, you wouldn't really expect him to call himself Josephine. The medieval commentators claimed that Kohelet was so called because he was assembling assemblies and speaking publicly in them, and the essence of this continues to find wide acceptance. I believe that the letter he, particularly in Aramaic often serves to mark a hiatus which replaces an earlier glottal stop. We see that Aramaic rhet corresponds to Hebrew ruc and Aramaic bhet corresponds to Hebrew bôsh. In the participle of such verbs in Aramaic and Arabic, unlike Hebrew, the form is exactly like Kohelet, if we accept the he as representing a glottal stop or a hiatus rather than an aspirate. So I would connect the word with the root of qôl, which occurs only as a noun in Hebrew, but is a common verb in Arabic. Accordingly, the word would mean speaking. But what about the feminine? Now the word Caliph in English means the supreme head of the world of Islam. It comes from the Arabic word xalifa, an abstract feminine word, which means replacement or successor. So the Caliph is the replacement or successor of the prophet, just as the Pope claims to be the replacement or successor of the apostle Paul. In many languages, physical gender or sex, and grammatical gender are related, but not identical. The shape of the word may determine its grammatical gender in defiance of biological reality. The German word for girl for instance is grammatically neuter, because it has a particular ending, and what it represents is not taken into consideration. In Arabic the word quwala meaning "loquacious" is feminine, yet may be applied to males because it is in reality an abstract noun like xalifa meaning loquacity or talkativeness. We might then translate Kohelet "Mr Talky-talk" or something of the sort, and this would, I think, shed light on the character of the book, as being essentially chatter, albeit of a thought-provoking kind, from which you may take or leave what you wish. It would be not unlike Luther's Table Talk, or works by such thinkers as Marcus Aurelius, Pascal or Montaigne, but with a warmer, more folksy appeal. You might well ask how this Arabism appears here. My late teacher Moshe Held used to get very angry when people used Arabic to explicate items in Ugaritic or other North-West semitic areas. He felt, with some justification, that Semitic scholars have a preoccupation with Arabic on account of its archaic character. But I believe nonetheless that Arabic preserves forms which may well have lingered underground in other parts of the Semitic world. Languages often contain unsuspected survivals of earlier usage, particularly in dialect situations. So that is my tentative contribution, for what it is worth.
Last year R.N. Whybray published a little book on Kohelet in which he skillfully sums up the opinions on the book, and I would recommend this to you as a reasonable, even-handed approach. I should like to quote his conclusion to you, because I am not able to say it any better:
Kohelet's teaching has been assessed in many different ways. In this book the attempt has been made to do justice to these conflicting views. It is, perhaps, permissible to end with a personal view. One way of approaching his thought is to see him as a theologian, or perhaps even as an apologist who was trying to find a way of reconciling the Jewish faith which he had inherited with the world as he knew it: a modern world which was undergoing rapid change. The traditional beliefs of Judaism had to be 'brought up to date' at certain points; and Kohelet radically questioned their traditional formulation when he judged it necessary to do so. But in putting forth his ideas he was not intending to prepare a new generation of apostates; rather he was seeking to equip his pupils to be Jewish believers in a world where there were many religions and philosophies claiming to possess the truth: to provide them with the means to argue the case for Judaism. And, at the same time, he was seeking truth for himself. His book contains no fully thought-out philosophical or theological system; it contains many apparent contradictions and unsolved problems. But it is perhaps the most fascinating book in the Old Testament.
Whybray is, I think, echoing the comment of the rabbis that the book begins and ends with divre torah. He starts on traditional ground, wanders far, and eventually concedes, without any of the fervor of the fanatic, that it is, after all, best to fear God and keep his commandments. It's not bad advice.
One final point which is inyana deyoma, appropriate to the day. It is pretty obvious why in Jewish tradition we read the books of Shir Hashirim, Ruth, Lamentations and Esther on the days that we do. Why do we read Kohelet on Succot? (Tabernacles) If you want the answer to this question, I suggest you read several books on Succot. Then read several books on Kohelet. Then read Kohelet. Then decide for yourself what the answer is. If you don't find one, then you will at least have proved the truth of our hero's assertion that of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh. Unless, of course, you enjoyed the search, in which case you prove his assertion that wisdom has the advantage over folly. Either way you win, and so does he.