CHAPTER X.
DATE AND PLACE OF COMPOSITION.
Jewish tradition, while admitting a Hezekian or post-Hezekian
redaction of the book, assigns the original authorship
of Ecclesiastes to Solomon. The Song of Songs it
regards as the monument of this king's early manhood, the
Book of Proverbs of his middle age, and the semi-philosophical
meditations before us as the work of his old age. The
tradition was connected by the Aggada with the favourite
legend[1] of the discrowned Solomon, but is based upon the
book itself, the passages due to the literary fiction of Solomon's
authorship (which Bickell indeed attributes to an interpolator)
having been misunderstood. Would that the author of the
Lectures on the Jewish Church had given the weight of his
name to the true explanation of these passages! The
reticence of the lines devoted in the second volume of the
Lectures to Ecclesiastes has led some critics to imagine that
according to Dean Stanley, this book, like much of Proverbs,
might possibly be the work of the 'wisest' of Israel's kings.
Little had the author profited by Ewald if he really allowed
such an absolute legend the smallest standing-ground among
reasonable hypotheses! Whichever way we look, whether
to the social picture, or to the language, or to the ideas of the
book, its recent origin forces itself upon us. The social
picture and the ideas need not detain us here. Either
Solomon was transported in prophetic ecstasy to far distant
times (the Targum on Koheleth frequently describes him as
a prophet), or the writer is a child of the dawning modern
age of Judaism. The former alternative is plainly impossible.
Political servitude, and a generally depressed state of
- ↑ See the Midrasch Kohelet (ed. Wünsche, 1880), or Ginsburg, p. 38.
