Ecclesiastes (Gr., 'preacher'), the title given in the Septuagint translation to a didactic poem called in Hebrew Kohēleth, which, according to the old tradition, was composed by Solomon. Solomon is not once expressly mentioned in it. Kohēleth is identified with the ideal Solomon in i. 12 and elsewhere, and is represented as looking back on his life as finished, just as a departed spirit might be supposed to do. The word itself is a feminine participle, and means 'the preaching.' Some think the name Solomon is understood, according to others it is rather the word Hokmah, 'Wisdom,' that is understood, and wisdom is called Kohēleth, because she 'taught the people knowledge' (Eccles. xii. 9; cf. Prov. i. 20 et seq., viii. 1 et seq.). Grotius and (more fully) Delitzsch have proved, what Luther in his Table-talk asserted, that the poem belongs to the latest of the Old Testament Scriptures. The style is very different from that of Proverbs, for it is charged with Aramaic elements, 'even to the finest veins of the language,' as Ewald has said and Knobel has elaborately demonstrated. Further, there is no trace in Proverbs of the doubts of Koheleth, and the historical background of the one is as bright as that of the other is gloomy. Koheleth was written by a Jewish thinker some time between 320 and 217 B.C. The date must be fixed later if Plumptre is right in discovering a tincture of Stoic and Epicurean philosophy in the book, but this Kleinert and Davidson emphatically deny, while both admit that here and there the language bears traces of Greek influence. No book of Scripture has been so variously judged; scarcely one commentator entirely agrees with another in its interpretation. The New Testament and the church fathers of the 1st century do not refer to it. Many of the Jewish doctors considered that it ought to be 'secreted.' The school of Shammai held that it did not 'defile the hands' (i.e. was not canonical), the school of Hillel held that it did, and its canonicity was not clearly decided till the Synod at Jamnia in 90 A.D. The homilies on the first three chapters by Gregory of Nyssa (4th century) form the earliest exegetical treatise on the book. The allegorical treatment by Gregory was still further developed by Jerome and Augustine, and throughout the middle ages Koheleth was credited with the twofold aim of demonstrating the nothingness of all worldly things and commending the ascetic and contemplative life, while Gregory the Great's explanation of the passages that resisted this view as 'ironical mockeries of the wicked' was universally accepted. Hugo of St Victor, Bonaventura, and other scholastics held that 'the intention of the book is to persuade men to despise the world.' The first Protestant commentator on Ecclesiastes was Brenz, who brought out its practical character as commending 'a pious use of the creatures,' and in this he was followed by Luther, who regarded viii. 15 as the scopus of the book. Few books have been favourites of so many different persons, and for such divers reasons. Renan finds in the author an 'amiable roué of the upper ten,' to whom the only certainty is that the pious are weaklings, and between whom and Heinrich Heine 'il n'y a qu'une porte à entr'ouvrir.' Frederick the Great called it a 'mirror of princes.' Jerome, Comenius, and Heugstenberg used it as a manual of religious consolation.
Many since Grotius have regarded it either as an anthology from different authors, or a dialogue between the false wisdom and the true. But Koheleth is doubtless a unity, and it would be hard, as Ewald remarks, to find elsewhere so much comprehended in such small compass. It presents in kaleidoscopic series the varying aspects of human life, tests the aims and results of each, and concludes of each in turn that 'this also is vanity.' This is the thread running through the book, which also tends to the practical conclusion that life being without result, a man should take the best of it by the exercise of good sense, and 'make his soul enjoy good in his labour.' The book of Koheleth shows the limitation of the Old Testament form of Revelation, and indicates negatively the transition from the Old Covenant to the New, which was set forth in the declarations of the Messianic Prophecies. According to Professor Davidson, through the book there is 'the cry of the human spirit for continuance, that it be not extinguished in death, that it may carry the gains accumulated here with it; the cry for a sphere adequate to the powers of which it is conscious, that it be no more the toy of outward things, but have all things under its feet; the cry that its moral instincts be not violated, that it should be taken more into the counsels of God, and know something even as it is known. If all this be like the flutterings of an eagle long chained, it has in it something prophetic. On the other hand, the preacher earnestly counsels every man, "Hold fast that which thou hast." God and his moral rule, however obscure its incidence be, and the moral life of man are sure.'
The most important modern commentaries and studies on Ecclesiastes are those of Ewald (Dichter des alten Bundes, vol. ii. 1867), Hitzig (1847), Elster (1855), Hahn (1860), L. Young (1865), Ginsburg (1861), Zöckler (1868; American ed. by Dr Taylor Lewis, 1872), Grätz (1871), T. P. Dale (1873), Tyler (1874), Delitzsch (1875), Plumptre (1881), Renan (1882), Wright (1883), Cheyne (Job and Solomon, 1887), Bradley (Lectures on Ecclesiastes, 1885), Nowack (forming part of the Exegetisches Handbuch), Professor Davidson ('Some Recent Books on Ecclesiastes,' in the Theological Review, Edin.,
1888), Cox (1891); Palm, Die Qohelet Litteratur (1886); Dillon, The Sceptics of the Old Testament (1895).