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The Story of Israel in the Book of Qohelet: Ecclesiastes as Cultural Memory

Online ISBN:
9780191744914
Print ISBN:
9780199657827
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Book

The Story of Israel in the Book of Qohelet: Ecclesiastes as Cultural Memory

Jennie Barbour
Jennie Barbour
DAAD Postdoctoral Scholar, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen
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Published online:
24 January 2013
Published in print:
6 September 2012
Online ISBN:
9780191744914
Print ISBN:
9780199657827
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

This book is a study of the making of collective memory within early Judaism in a seminal text of the Western canon. The book of Ecclesiastes and its speaker Qohelet are famous for saying that there is nothing new under the sun, and in the literary tradition of the modern West that has been taken as the motto of a book that is universal in scope, Greek in its patterns of thought, and floating free from the particularism and historical concerns of the rest of the Bible. Jennie Barbour argues that reading the book as a general compendium in this way causes the reader to miss a strong undercurrent in the text. While Ecclesiastes says nothing about the great founding events of Israel’s story, it is haunted by the decline and fall of the nation and the Babylonian exile, as the trauma of the loss of the kingdom of Solomon persists through a spectrum of intertextual relationships. The view of Qohelet from the throne in Jerusalem takes in the whole sweep of Israel’s remembered historical experiences; Ecclesiastes is revealed as not simply as a piece of marketplace philosophy, but as a learned essay in processing a community’s memory, with strong ties to the rest of Jewish and Christian scripture.

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