The first-person speaker of the book. Presents himself as son of David, king in Jerusalem, surpassing all who were before him in Jerusalem in wisdom — the Solomonic persona borrowed to give the catalogue of failed projects its rhetorical authority. The historical author is not Solomon; the late Hebrew of the book fixes composition in the third century BCE, in Hellenistic Judaea. What Qoheleth’s voice does is investigate the wisdom claims of his own tradition with the rigour of an honest empiricist, report what he finds, and refuse to soften it. He is not an unbeliever — God appears throughout as the giver of life and the one to whom all things return — but he refuses to flatter the doctrines that the rest of the wisdom tradition has sometimes flattered. The most honest voice in the canon.
Ecclesiastes — who's who
The voices of Ecclesiastes — the preacher, the frame, and the figures of his argument.
Ecclesiastes is not a narrative book in the sense that Genesis or the Gospels are narrative books. It has no plot, no sequence of events, no cast of human characters who act and interact. What it has are voices and figures: Qoheleth’s first-person voice across twelve chapters, the third-person frame narrator at the opening and close, the Solomonic persona that Qoheleth borrows for his royal catalogue, the Young Man addressed in chapter 12, and a set of conceptual figures — hevel, death, the wise man, the fool — that function throughout as almost-characters in the book’s sustained argument.
The speaking voices
The third-person voice that opens the book (‘the words of Qoheleth, the son of David, king in Jerusalem’) and returns at the very end in 12:8–14. Vouches for Qoheleth’s wisdom and craft, then delivers the closing summary: ‘Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man.’ Whether this is Qoheleth addressing himself in the third person, or a later editor adding a frame to bring the text within the bounds of what the canon could keep, has been argued for two thousand years. The book keeps the tension. It does not resolve it.
The figures of the argument
The figure Qoheleth presents in chapters 1 and 2: a king who has built houses, planted vineyards, gathered silver and gold and the peculiar treasure of kings, and surpassed all who were before him in Jerusalem. The persona is Solomonic; the historical author is not Solomon. The strategy is one familiar from ancient Near Eastern wisdom literature, in which a king or sage is given a literary voice that the actual writer borrows to lend authority to the investigation. Only Solomon, in the Hebrew imagination, could plausibly claim to have tried every great project and to have had the resources to test the wisdom enterprise to its limits. By placing the failure in the mouth of the king who had everything, Qoheleth makes the failure systemic.
Chapter 12 opens with a direct address to a figure who has been implicit throughout the book and is now named: ‘Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth, while the evil days come not, nor the years draw nigh, when thou shalt say, I have no pleasure in them.’ He is the addressee of the closing chapter and, by extension, of the whole book. He is being told to remember his Creator now, before old age comes, because the catalogue of failures the speaker has just performed is not an argument against doing the religious work; it is an argument for doing it without the false expectations the rest of the wisdom tradition has sometimes encouraged. The book is not addressed to the dying. It is addressed to the young, who still have time to receive its corrections.
Treat the master word of the book as a figure, because the book treats it that way. Hevel — vapor, breath, mist — appears about thirty-eight times across twelve chapters, and the cumulative effect gives the word a presence in the text that approaches personification. Hevel is what every project Qoheleth investigates turns out to be. Hevel is what the speaker’s days are made of. Hevel is what is left when the speaker has finished his catalogue. The word is also, unmistakably, the proper name Abel — the brother killed by Cain in Genesis 4, whose life is the most literally fleeting in the Hebrew Bible. The resonance is in the Hebrew, and the readers who first heard the book recited would have heard, behind every repetition of the word, the echo of the brother whose life was breath and was over.
Death is the single most important presence in Ecclesiastes after Qoheleth himself, and it is the reason every project the speaker investigates fails the test he sets it. The wise man dies as the fool dies. The rich man’s wealth passes to a son who may not know how to handle it. The legacy of the great is forgotten in a generation. Death does not appear as a personified figure with a scythe; it appears as the structural fact that sets the limits within which everything Qoheleth investigates is happening. The book’s final allegory of old age in chapter 12 is the only sustained passage in scripture that depicts death as approach rather than event: the hands of the keepers of the house trembling, the strong men bowing themselves, the daughters of music being brought low, the silver cord loosed, the golden bowl broken at the cistern.