Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 154:615 (Jul 1997)
Article: The Structure and Unity of Ecclesiastes
Author: James S. Reitman

BSac 154:615 (Jul 97) p. 297

The Structure and Unity of Ecclesiastes

James S. Reitman

[James S. Reitman is a physician at Wilford Hall Medical Center, Lackland Air Force Base, San Antonio, Texas.]

Perhaps no books of the Bible have had more potential to disrupt complacency in the reader than the Wisdom books of Job and Ecclesiastes, both of which touch centrally on the “seeming inequalities of divine providence.”1 However, while the argument of Job can be persuasively shown to have a cohesive literary structure, dramatic progression, and resolution,2 Ecclesiastes seems poorly connected and has led a number of commentators to conclude that “in general no progression of thought from one section to another is discernible.”3 Adding to the difficulty of tracing

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the thread of Qoheleth’s argument is the uniqueness of the Hebrew, which makes it difficult to trace the historical context of the book.4

Of greater concern to the average reader, however, is the book’s generally cynical tone, which tends to pull the reader toward despair throughout; this is only reinforced by the book’s main theme of futility (“vanity,” KJV).5 Such ostensible nihilism has made it difficult for many commentators to accept Ecclesiastes as establishing a positive pattern for living;6 in fact the apparently contradictory reflections encountered in the argument in both close (cf. 8:12–13) and remote (cf. 2:17; 4:1–3; 6:3–6; and 7:1 with 9:4) contexts often seem more consistent with strains of modern existentialism than with the theology of the rest of Scripture.7 The strength of these concerns has made all the more

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imperative the task of identifying a unified, coherent message in the text, so that Whybray has issued the following challenge.

Since Ecclesiastes is evidently not a single systematic treatise in which there is a progression from a set of premises to a logical conclusion, it remains to be considered in what other sense it might be a unified composition…. It deals with a number of distinct, though re...