Recent approaches to the structure of the book of Ecclesiastes

Recent approaches to the structure of Ecclesiastes

Castellino and Wright

Perhaps disheartened by the inimitable Delitzsch, it wasn't until the 1960's that approaches to the structure of Ecclesiastes became a distinct area of study. This focus and the earlier pessimism meant anyone who wanted to assert a structure had to do more than simply state their structure; it had to be defensible. 

In the 1960's two Roman Catholic stablemates identified similar structures and were published in the same CBQ omnibus. George Castellino and Addison Wright both identified a book whose body could be divided in twain. There were questions in the first half and answers in the second. For Castellino it was the imperative שׁמר at 4.17 (5.1 English) which signalled the turning point. This was a pretty neat structure, which drew attention to some clusters of vocabulary limited to one half or the other. 

Unfortunately for him, Wright's structure blew him out of the water. It is not to say it was good, but it grabbed everyone's attention. 'The Riddle of the Sphinx' and his two follow up articles found a bunch of numerical values matching up with verses and structure and so on. He used Ben Sira to show this is what readers would be expecting - a literary work thoroughly worked through with numerical significance. 

While Wright's ideas are fantastical, the thoroughness of his work means his has been the accepted model for half a Century. Occasionally this seems to be for lack of effort (see Murphy's WBC volume which criticises Wright yet uses it nonetheless), but thankfully in the last two decades others have come up with their own approaches.

Nonetheless, these two approaches demonstrated two observations which remain valid regardless of the structure. The first of these is the idea of alternation, two different types of discourse. And the second is the importance of keywords and clustered vocabulary.

Zimmerli and de Jong

Zimmerli wrote a commentary (in German, in Fraktur script, if anyone is interested in reading it) but also an article where he considered two alternatives: Traktat (treatise) oder Sentenzensammlung (a collection of aphorisms). What seemed to be Zimmerli's issue was trying to decide which of these we should decide Ecclesiastes to be, although the question I was asking as I read his article, was 'why not both?' (with apologies to the Old El Paso advert).

De Jong followed his 'intuitions' (really, that's how he described his method) to divide the body of the book into two sets of panels, although he guided his intuitions by grouping together clusters of vocabulary. One half he called 'observation', the other 'instruction', and these sets demonstrated the two types of discourse in the book. Seow had a similar approach, although without focussing so much on the vocabulary, and had two pairs as contrasted with de Jong's four pairs.

These authors built on the slightly crazy in Wright to come up with some truly plausible structures that seek to give credence to the two types of discourse sensed as one reads - the observations of Qohelet paired with the many wisdom sayings throughout. However the question Fox asked remains: what effect does it have on the reading of the book? Most of these structures, when one actually tries to read Ecclesiastes through their filter, as Fox described Wright, amount to no more than a 'ghost in the attic'. 

There is also something to be said for the importance of keywords, as there do seem to be clusters and regularity of phrases, but so far none of the words or phrases (such as הבל hebel (vanity) or 'chasing/shepherding the wind') have really done the job. Perhaps it is not thematic keywords we should be looking for, but structural keywords. Maybe we will do just that...