Ecclesiastes and the Riddle of Authorship

This book examines the long-held scholarly assumptions that the Book of Ecclesiastes represents a heterodox or otherwise "minority" voice in the Hebrew Bible. Such a conclusion is based on certain theological assumptions of modern exegetes about what constitutes "orthodox" biblical teaching on the relationship between the human and the divine. An exposition of Ecclesiastes which draws upon texts throughout the Hebrew Bible and ancient Near-Eastern and Greco-Roman wisdom will show that, rather than see Qoheleth as a brilliant realist, a disillusioned pessimist or some other form of counter-cultural intellectual, he is instead comfortably at home in a speculative intellectual tradition that is ubiquitous in the biblical and classical worlds.