with mas. predicates.[1]
In these there can be nowhere anything said of a heightening of the idea effected by the transition to fem. forms. But the persons acting, although they are men, are thought of as neut.; and they appear, separated from the determination of their gender, as the representatives of the activity spoken of. According to this, Koheleth is, without regard to the gender, a preaching person. The Book of Koheleth thus bears, in its second word, as on its very forehead, the stamp of the Ezra-Nehemiah era to which it belongs.
As the woman of Endor, when she raised Samuel out of Hades at the request of Saul, sees “gods ascending out of the earth” (1Sa 28:13), so it is not the veritable Solomon who speaks in this book, but his spirit, for which this neut. name Koheleth is appropriate. When he says, Ecc 1:12, “I, Koheleth, have been king over Israel in Jerusalem,” he recognises himself not as the reigning monarch, but as having been king. The Talmudic Aggada has joined to this הייתי, the fable that Solomon was compelled to descend from the throne on account of his transgression of the law, which was then occupied by an angel in his stead, but externally bearing his likeness; and that he now went about begging, saying: “I, Koheleth, have been king over Israel in Jerusalem;” but that they struck him with a stick, and set before him a plate of groats; for they said to him: “How canst thou speak thus? There the king sits in his palace on this throne.”[2]
In this fiction there is at least grammatical intelligence. For it is a vain delusion for one to persuade himself that Solomon in his advanced age could say, with reference to the period of his life as ruler, “I have been king,” fui rex - he was certainly always so during the forty years of his reign, and on to the last moment of his life. Or can the words מלך הייתי means sum rex? The case is as follows: הייתי is never the expression of the abstract present, or of existence without regard to time; “I am king” is expressed in this sense by the substantival clause ani mělěk. In every case where one can translate הייתי by “I am,” e.g., Psa 88:5, the present being is thought of as the result of an historical past (sum = factus sum). But at the most, הייתי, when it looks from the present back upon the past, out of which it arose, signifies “I have become,” Gen 32:11; Psa 30:8; Jer 20:7; or when it looks back into the past as
- ↑ Vid., Geiger, Lehrbuch, xvi. 6, and cf. Weiss' Studien, p. 90, who arbitrarily explains away this linguistic usage. Duke, in his Sprache der Mishna, p. 75, avoids the difficulty by the supposition of inadmissible ellipses.
- ↑ Jer. Sanhedrin ii. 6 goes further into the story; b. Gittin 68b, where the angel is designated by the Persian name Ashmodee, cf. Jellinek's Sammlung kleiner Midrashim 2. xxvi.
