Peter Enns - Ecclesiastes (THOTC) (Two Horizons Old Testament Commentary (THOTC))

J. GORDON MCCONVILLE and CRAIG BARTHOLOMEW, General Editors

Two features distinguish THE Two HORIZONS OLD TESTAMENT COMMENTARY series: theological exegesis and theological reflection.

Exegesis since the Reformation era and especially in the past two hundred years emphasized careful attention to philology, grammar, syntax, and concerns of a historical nature. More recently, commentary has expanded to include social-scientific, political, or canonical questions and more.

Without slighting the significance of those sorts of questions, scholars in THE Two HORIZONS OLD TESTAMENT COMMENTARY locate their primary interests on theological readings of texts, past and present. The result is a paragraph-by-paragraph engagement with the text that is deliberately theological in focus.

Theological reflection in THE Two HORIZONS OLD TESTAMENT COMMENTARY takes many forms, including locating each Old Testament book in relation to the whole of Scripture - asking what the biblical book contributes to biblical theology - and in conversation with constructive theology of today. How commentators engage in the work of theological reflection will differ from book to book, depending on their particular theological tradition and how they perceive the work of biblical theology and theological hermeneutics. This heterogeneity derives as well from the relative infancy of the project of theological interpretation of Scripture in modern times and from the challenge of grappling with a book's message in Greco-Roman antiquity, in the canon of Scripture and history of interpretation, and for life in the admittedly diverse Western world at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

THE Two HORIZONS OLD TESTAMENT COMMENTARY 1S written primarily for students, pastors, and other Christian leaders seeking to engage in theological interpretation of Scripture.

Ingrid Enns 1931-2009

Who knows if the human spirit rises upward and if the spirit of the animal goes down into the earth? - QOHELET

In my Father's house are many rooms. - JESus

We do not want you to be uninformed about those who sleep, so that you do not grieve like the rest who have no hope. - PAUL

xi

xiii

The more I write, the more I understand the many ways I am dependent on many others.

I am indeed grateful for the many students I taught at Westminster Theological Seminary during my fourteen years on the faculty. My thoughts began to take shape in teaching "Poetry and Wisdom Literature" to M.Div. and M.A.R. students, and then benefited greatly from the Th.M. and Ph.D. students in the Ecclesiastes seminar I led for ten years. The fruit of those intimate, interactive settings are plain to me, even if hidden to general readers.

Two former teachers in particular have had a significant influence on how I approach Ecclesiastes. Tremper Longman III was first my teacher at Westminster, then a colleague, and now a trusted collaborator and lifelong friend. James L. Kugel, my doctoral advisor at Harvard University, introduced me to early Jewish and rabbinic exegesis, and from him I learned what a truly close reading of the Hebrew text entails. It is fair to say that my own academic journey is a synthesis of the two influences represented by these men.

I am deeply indebted to the work of three student assistants: Art Boulet (Princeton Theological Seminary), David Griffin (Westminster Theological Seminary), and Rob Kashow (Dallas Theological Seminary). All three worked through the manuscript at various stages and made many corrections, offered numerous suggestions (all with superhuman speed and accuracy), and helped secure copious amounts of secondary literature. It is truly a "grievous task" I have laid upon them, and their work not only sped up the completion of this volume by many months, but kept me from mirroring Qohelet's sense of despair over living. I am also thankful to Rob Kashow for preparing the Scripture index and Steve Bohannon (Princeton Theological Seminary) for preparing the name index. Russell Schaffner proofread the manuscript in its final stages.

As always, my wife Sue and children Erich, Elizabeth, and Sophie are never far from me - quite literally - no matter what I write. Throughout my career, they have typically been walking about above my basement study, and it is hard to imagine it otherwise, although departures to college have interrupted this familiar rhythm. There is no more palpable influence on my life than Sue, my wife of now twenty-seven years, and our (nearly all adult) children, and I hope this commentary reflects some of my own growth as the husband and father of this wonderful little family.

This volume is dedicated to my parents, Hans and Ingrid, RussianGerman and Polish-German immigrants, respectively, who built from scratch a life in the United States beginning in the late 1950s, and who provided for my sister Angelika and me far more than they ever dreamed of in their own early lives. My father passed away as I began this commentary and my mother passed away just a few weeks after I completed the first draft. It has not escaped my notice that their deaths frame my work on a biblical book whose author railed against the inviolability of death, and I have heard the echo of his voice more clearly and deeply than I might like.

To introduce a book of the Bible is often seen as a preliminary necessity, almost a courtesy to ease readers into the content of the book. This is not the case with the book of Ecclesiastes, for which it is precisely the standard introductory questions - who wrote the book, when, and for what purpose - that continue to prove challenging for any commentator. Not only will one find widely divergent answers to these questions documented throughout the history of interpretation of Ecclesiastes, but the difficulty is that how one answers these questions will ultimately affect one's interpretation of the book as a whole.

There is, in other words, a vicious circle in interpreting Ecclesiastes. How one understands the overarching message of Ecclesiastes as a whole will affect how one handles the details of the book itself, yet the book's overall message cannot be determined apart from the book's details. Of course, on one level, this circle is operative with any biblical book, but the problems are augmented in the case of Ecclesiastes: it is not only the introductory questions that prove elusive, but the very details of the book, the data by which a plausible model of the whole must be constructed, likewise suffer from difficulties and ambiguities, and thus challenge any attempt to harness its overall message. It is a common experience when reading Ecclesiastes that, just when it seems the book's train of thought has been apprehended and some firm conclusion is forthcoming, a verse or two later the author says something that turns it all on its head. One begins to suspect that this is precisely what he has in mind, a point we will have a chance to observe throughout this commentary.