Bible Difficulties (57 page)

Hendry states, "The author does not really claim to be Solomon but places his words in Solomon's mouth" (in Guthrie,
New Bible Commentary
, p. 571).

While it is true that the author does not call himself "Solomon" but only refers to himself as
Qohelet
(related to the word
qahal
, "assembly," "congregation"), it does violence to the rights of language to assert that the author of this philosophical discourse does not claim to be the son of David, king in Jerusalem. While "son" (
ben
) occasionally is used of later generations (such as a grandson, great-grandson, or even remoter descendants than that), the other details the author gives concerning himself leave no doubt that he presents himself to his readers as being King Solomon himself. He refers to his unrivaled wisdom (1:16), his unsurpassed wealth (2:8), his tremendous retinue of servants (2:7), his unlimited opportunities for carnal pleasure (2:3), and his very extensive building projects. No other descendant of David measures up to these specifications except Solomon, David's immediate successor.

Most modern scholars admit that the
purported
author of Ecclesiastes is Solomon; but they maintain that this was simply a literary device employed by a later author, now unknown to us, who wished to teach the ultimate futility of a materialistic worldview. If this could be accepted as valid, it would certainly put in question almost every other affirmation of authorship to be found in any other book of the Bible. Some later, unknown author might equally well have pretended to be Isaiah, Jeremiah, Hosea, or the apostle Paul, simply as "a literary device to express his own views." If it were any other book than the Bible, this would have to be classified as forgery, a mere product of deception, which would render the actual author of such a spurious work liable to damages in a court of law. It is more than doubtful that a Bible that holds to such high standards of integrity and honesty and that was certified by the Lord Jesus and His apostles as being the infallible Word of God could be composed of spurious work by authors who paraded under assumed names.

The chief argument against the authenticity of Ecclesiastes as a work of the historic Solomon is drawn from the data of linguistics. It is urged that the language and vocabulary of this book differ markedly from other tenth-century B.C. works composed in Hebrew and contains many terms found in Aramaic documents (such as Daniel and the Talmud) or in late biblical or postbiblical Hebrew (such as Esther, Nehemiah and the Mishnah). Delitzsch drew up a list of ninety-six words, forms, and expressions found nowhere else in the Bible except in Exilic and post-Exilic books like Ezra, Esther, Nehemiah, Chronicles, Malachi, or the Mishnah. Zoeckler claimed that there are Aramaisms in almost every verse, but Hengstenberg found only ten demonstrable 256

Aramaisms in the entire twelve chapters. From the standpoint of possible political and social allusions, the fifth century B.C. is suggested as a possible time of composition. But these scholars fail to discuss the problem that Ecclesiastes no more resembles fifth-century Hebrew works than it does those of the tenth century (apart from the Song of Solomon and Proverbs).

James Muilenberg ("A Qohelet Scroll from Qumran,"
Bulletin of the American Schools
of Oriental Research
135 [October 1954]: 20) comments on the discovery of mid-second-century fragments of Ecclesiastes discovered in Qumran Cave Four:

"Linguistically the book is unique. There is no question that its language has many striking peculiarities; these have been explained by some to be late Hebrew (discussed by Margoliouth and Gordis) for which the language of the Mishnah is said to offer more than adequate support (a contention effectively answered...in the
Jewish Encyclopedia
V, 33, where he points out the linguistic affinities of Qohelet with the Phoenician inscriptions, e.g., Eshmunazar, Tabnith). The Aramaic cast of the language has long been recognized, but only within recent years has its Aramaic provenance been claimed and supported in any detail (F. Zimmerman, C.C. Torrey, H.L. Ginsburg)...Dahood was written on Canaanite-Phoenician influences in Qohelet, defending the thesis that the book of Ecclesiastes was originally composed by an author who wrote in Hebrew but was influenced by Phoenician spelling, grammar and vocabulary, and who shows heavy Canaanite-Phoenician literary influence" (
Biblica
33, 1952, pp. 35-52, 191-221).

In weighing the force of the linguistic argument, it should be noted that a comprehensive survey of all the data--including vocabulary, morphology, syntax, and style--indicates that the text of Ecclesiastes does not resemble the literary style or vocabulary of any book of the Hebrew Bible, or indeed of any late Hebrew work preserved to us up into the second century B.C., when the earliest fragments of Ecclesiastes from Qumran are to be dated paleographically. The sole exception would be the apocryphal Book of Ecclesiasticus, which is admittedly composed by an author (Jesus ben Sirach) who was profoundly influenced by
Qohelet
and tried to imitate its style and approach in many passages.

In the judgment of this writer, the only convincing case of affinity is that advanced by Mitchell Dahood, referred to by Muilenberg as quoted above. The reason for the peculiar vocabulary, syntax, and style seems to be found in the literary genre to which Ecclesiastes belonged--the genre of the philosophical discourse. If this particular genre was first developed in Phoenicia, and if Solomon was well read in this whole area of wisdom literature (cf. 1 Kings 4:30-34), there is every reason to believe that he deliberately chose to write in the idiom and style that had already been established for that genre. Dahood's evidence is quite conclusive.
Qohelet
shows a marked tendency toward Phoenician spelling (which omitted vowel letters even for inflectional sufformatives), distinctively Phoenician inflections, pronouns, particular, syntactical constructions, lexical borrowings, and analogies of various sorts. The alleged Aramaisms turn out to be employed also in the Phoenician inscriptions as well; so they prove little in the way of a late date of composition.

257

As for Dahood himself, he tries to account for this close affinity to Phoenician by supposing that some sizable colony of Jewish refugees settled up in Phoenicia after the Fall of Jerusalem in 587 B.C., and then he suggests that it was this èmigre' group that composed
Qohelet
. But this theory is well-nigh untenable in view of Nebuchadnezzar's relentless pursuit of all Jewish refugee groups, even to the point of invading Egypt in order to massacre the Jews who had fled there.

Only one reasonable alternative remains. That period when Israel enjoyed the closest relations with Tyre and Sidon, on both the commercial and the political levels--and cultural as well (it was a Phoenician Jew named Hiram who designed and produced all the art work connected with the temple in Jerusalem, and large numbers of Phoenician artisans and craftsmen worked under his supervision)--was unquestionably the age of Solomon, that period when wisdom literature was most zealously cultivated. This was the era when Solomon composed his Proverbs, and he may have had a hand in popularizing the venerable Book of Job. From the standpoint of linguistics, then, and from the standpoint of comparative literature and the known proclivities of the age, Solomon's period in the tenth century B.C. must be regarded as the most likely time for the composition of Ecclesiastes. (For the various arguments from internal evidence and

"telltale expressions" advanced by advocates of the late date theory, see my
A Survey of
Old Testament Introduction
, pp. 484-88.)

Does Ecclesiastes 3:21 teach that animals have a spirit just as man does?

Ecclesiastes 3:21 reads, "Who knoweth the spirit of man that goeth upward, and the spirit of the beast that goeth downward to the earth?" (KJV). Since it is usually understood that the spirit of man is the focal point of the divine image in man that enables him to reason and respond to God religiously, it sounds a bit startling to hear that the

"spirit" of an animal goes downward, as its body (like man's body) turns to dust in the grave (v.20). NASB alleviates the problem by translating it as "breath": "Who knows that the breath of man ascends upward and the breath of the beast descends downward to the earth?" But the basic problem still remains, for the term
ruah
("breath," "spirit") is used for both man and beast. This is true whether we understand v.21 as a question implying that there is real doubt as to where the "
spirit
" of man or beast really goes after death; or whether we are to take it as a regretful question, implying, "How many people really know this fact, that the breath of man goes upward and the breath of the beast goes downward, when they die?" (I personally incline to the latter interpretation, but it is possible that the author meant the question skeptically.)

In this use of
ruah
, we face a familiar phenomenon in the history of the development of transcendental terms in almost every language. From the observation that a living man or animal breathes in and out as long as it is alive, it is natural to derive a term such as

"breath" and make it a symbol of life. Thus we have quite frequently in the Flood narrative the phrase
ruah hayyim
("the breath of life") as attributed to animals, both those that drowned in the Flood (Gen. 6:17; 7:22) and those that were preserved in the ark (Gen. 7:15). In Genesis 7:22 it is even combined with
nismat ruah hayyim
("the breath of 258

the spirit of life"--
nesamah
being a word used almost exclusively for literal breathing and nothing beyond). The Egyptian phrase
t'w `nh
("breath of life," conventionally pronounced
tchau ànekh
) occurs very frequently in Egyptian literature, and it is possible that Moses had this expression in mind and translated it into the Hebrew equivalent.

Here, then, we have a general, nontechnical use of
ruah
as applied to animals possessed of life. I am not aware of any other passages where
ruah
is used with respect to animals.

Apart from the 100 times where
ruah
is applied to "wind" or "winds," the rest of its 275

occurrences pertain to human beings, angels (who are essentially
ruah
without any real, physical body), demonic spirits (who were formerly angels of God, before Satan was cast out of heaven), or God Himself: the Third Person of the Trinity is spoken of as
ruah

'elohim
("the Spirit of God") or
ruah Yahweh
("the Spirit of Yahweh [or, as mispronounced, `Jehovah']").

As is so often the case with terms that began with a primitive and general meaning, it later became specialized so as to acquire a technical, figurative meaning on a metaphysical level. The observation that living creatures breathe leads to the use of

"breath" as a term for "life-principle." From that point on it becomes a matter of usage whether to employ
ruah, nesamah
, or some other word referring to air in motion as a symbol for the spiritual element in man's being--that which makes him distinctively human, as opposed to subhuman creatures that also have lungs and breathe. It is not because of some inherent root meaning, then, but because of established usage that
ruah
became the technical term for the image of God in man, that capacity for thinking of God and responding to Him, that ability to comprehend the difference between right and wrong and make moral decisions, that ability to reason in a generalizing, philosophical manner, which distinguishes man from beasts. The corresponding term for this in the Septuagint and in the New Testament is
pneuma
. In biblical usage, then,
pneuma
became equivalent to
ruah
. Appropriately enough,
pneuma
also was derived from the verb
pneo
("to blow").

A closely related term for the nonphysical element in man was
nepes
("soul"). This too was derived from a root idea of breathing (
napasu
in Akkadian meant "breathe freely,"

then, "become broad or extended"; the noun
napistu
meant "breath" or "life"). But it became specialized to mean the individual identity of any living, breathing creature, whether man or animal (for both
nepes
and
psyche
, its Greek equivalent, are used freely for beasts as well as men). The
nepes
is the conscious center of emotions, desire or appetite, or inclination or mood. It is the locus of each man's personality and the point of reference for his self-consciousness. Gustav Oehler defines
nepes
as springing from the
ruah
and as existing continually through it (a statement that could not be applied to animals, however); individuality resides in it, that is, in the man's ego or self. It is interesting to note that
nepes
with the appropriate possessive pronoun is the most frequent way of expressing the reflexive noun in a specific way. Thus "he saved himself"

would be expressed by "he saved his
nepes
[or `soul']" (cited by J.I. Marais, "Soul," in
The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia
, 5 vols., ed. by J. Orr [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1939], p. 2838).

259

It is to be noted, therefore, that there is a distinction between "spirit" (
ruah
) and "soul"

(
nepes
) in the Old Testament, just as there is between
pneuma
and
psyche
in the New Testament. These, in turn, are differentiated from the term for "body" (
basar
), which also (when used figuratively) has a psychological meaning as well as the basic physical idea of a literal, flesh-and-blood body. The
basar
is the seat of all sensations and the data supplied by the five senses: but it is also used in Psalm 84 in parallelism with
nepes
as the vehicle of a spiritual longing for the living God. The same is true in Psalm 63:1: "My soul [
nepes
] thirsts for Thee, my flesh [
basar
] yearns [lit., `faints'] for Thee, in a dry and weary land where there is no water" (NASB). Again, in Psalm 16:9 it is used in parallelism with "heart" (
leb
) and "glory" (
kabod
--a surrogate for
ruah
, which is the divine element in man): "Therefore my heart is glad, and my glory rejoices; my
flesh
also will dwell securely" (NASB). Thus the "flesh" is capable of feeling satisfaction in a state of security in the loving presence of God.