David J. H. Beldman - Classified Bibliography on Ecclesiastes

A Classified Bibliography on Ecclesiastes

A Classified Bibliography on Ecclesiastes

Russell L. Meek and David J. H. Beldman

T&T CLARK

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

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First published in Great Britain 2019

Copyright Russell L. Meek and David J. H. Beldman, 2019

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Cover design: Tjaa Krivec

Cover image: Holy bible open at the Book of Ecclesiastes, Church of the Holy Trinity, Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England ( Ian Dagnall / Alamy Stock Photo).

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Contents

This project started when David Beldman compiled a ninety-page bibliography of secondary sources on Ecclesiastes in my role as a research assistant for Craig Bartholomew, who at the time was writing a commentary on the book (Baker Academic, 2009). Since the publisher only wanted a works-cited bibliography, the decision was made to put it online, where David Clines discovered it. We would like to thank David Clines for reaching out and suggesting this project and also Dominic Mattos and the team at T&T Clark for taking on the project and bringing it to completion when Sheffield Phoenix Press made the decision to stop publishing books. We would also like to thank Stuart Weeks for encouraging us in the work and for sharing a significant compilation of bibliographical sources from his own files. This project would have been much more daunting without his selflessness.

Several other people have been instrumental in this process, including Richard VanHolst (research assistant at Redeemer University College), who expertly edited the bibliography, and Ashley Bootsma (Davids teaching assistant at Redeemer), who helped with formatting early on in the project. In addition, Redeemer University College and Louisiana College both provided generous grants to support the project. We are grateful to work at institutions that support scholarship.

Russell would also like to thank his wife, Brittany. She demonstrates daily that He who finds a wife finds good, and has received favor from Yahweh (Prov. 18:22). David is thankful for the patience and support of his family.

What book on Ecclesiastes would be complete without reference to Eccl. 12:12: Of making many books there is no end, and much study wearies the body? The present volume follows on the heels of Stuart Weekss bibliography on Ecclesiastes, The Making of Many Books: Printed Works on Ecclesiastes 15231875 (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2014). His was a massive undertaking that collated an enormous amount of literature on the book of Ecclesiastes over about three hundred years. Our work picks up in 1900, twenty-five years after Weekss work stops, and continues to 2015. It includes monographs, commentaries, articles, essays, and some dissertations published in French, German, Italian, Spanish, and English.

The goal in developing this bibliography was to create a resource that would make engaging secondary literature on Ecclesiastes easier and more efficient. With that in mind, rather than annotating works, we chose to classify them according to the subject under consideration. We thought this method would prove particularly beneficial to scholars and research students working in the book of Ecclesiastes. The selection of topics under which to classify the literature was driven by the works themselves. However, selecting how to classify the literature proved to be a more difficult task than we initially thought. Thus, while we have striven to create an exhaustive resource, it is inevitable that we have left out some categories.

The layout of the bibliography is straightforward. The first category is the chapters of Ecclesiastes, where readers will find works that addressnot surprisinglyparticular passages in Ecclesiastes. The rest of the bibliography is divided into various topics within Ecclesiastes (e.g., retribution theology, death), methodologies for interpreting Ecclesiastes, the books Sitz em Leben , how it has been read and translated (e.g., rabbinic literature, versions), its structure, and its language. Where those works cover more than one chapter, they have been listed in the relevant sections for each chapter. In addition to cross-listing between chapters of Ecclesiastes, works that cover more than one topic, or a topic and a specific passage (e.g., intertextuality and Ecclesiastes 3), have been listed in each relevant section. We hope that this resource will prove valuable in engaging Ecclesiastess rich history of interpretation over the past century and spur further engagement with this important biblical text.

Russell L. Meek and David J. H. Beldman, November 2018