then 'Vanity of vanities' would be a patent misrepresentation. All is not 'vanity,' if there is in human nature a point connecting a man with that world, most distant and yet most near, where in the highest sense God is. If Koheleth wrote xii. 7b], he cannot have written xii. 8, any more than the author of the Imitation could have written Vanitas vanitatum both on his first page and on his last. Yet who but Koheleth can be responsible for it? For the later editors of whom I have spoken, would be far from approving such a reversal of the great charter of man's dignity in the eighth Psalm. To me, the motto simply says that all Koheleth's wanderings had but brought him back to the point from which he started. 'Grandissima vanità,' as Castelli, in his dignified Italian, puts it, 'tutto è vanità.' All that I can assign to the editors in this verse are the parenthetic words 'saith the Koheleth.' Everywhere else we find 'Koheleth;' here alone, and perhaps vii. 17 (corrected text), 'the Koheleth.'[1]
Let us now consider the Epilogue itself.
And moreover (it should be said) that Koheleth was a wise man;
further, he taught the people wisdom, and weighed and made search,
(yea) composed many proverbs. Koheleth sought to find out
pleasant words, and he wrote down[2] plainly words of truth. The
words of the wise are like goads, and like nails well driven in; the
members of the assemblies[3] have [in the case of Ecclesiastes] given
them forth from another shepherd.[4] And as for all beyond them,
my son, be warned; of making many books there is no end, and
- ↑ The object of the article is perhaps to suggest that Koheleth is not really a proper name. In vii. 27 we should correct ām'rāh qōheleth to āmar haqqōheleth. Probably these words are an interpolation from the margin. They are nowhere else used in support of Koheleth's opinions. The author of the interpolation may have wished to indicate his disagreement with Koheleth's low opinion of women.
- ↑ So Aquila, Pesh., Vulg., Grätz, Renan, Klostermann (v'kāthab).
- ↑ I.e. the assemblies of 'wise men' or perhaps of Soferim. Surely ba'alē must refer to persons. The meaning 'assemblies' is justified by Talmudic passages quoted by Grätz, Delitzsch, and Wright.
- ↑ So Klostermann. 'Shepherd' must, I think, mean teacher (comp. Jer. ii. 8, iii. 15 &c.); the expression is suggested by the 'goads.' 'One shepherd' (the text-reading) might mean Solomon; and we might go on to suppose the Solomonic origin of Proverbs as well as Ecclesiastes to be asserted in this verse. But the author of the Epilogue apparently considers Koheleth to be merely fictitiously Solomon, but really a wise man like any other. If so, he cannot have grouped it with Proverbs as a strictly Solomonic work.
