Kohelet

Traditionalist commentators assume that the author of Kohelet was a man ofdeep religious sensibilities and that his words, as obscure as they sometimesmay be, reflect profound religious insights. They therefore tend to readKohelet as a series of non-literal homilies based on hidden meaningsimbedded in the author’s often less than clear expressions. By contrast, manymodern commentators seem to approach it as a literary curiosity badlymishandled over the millennia, and have little or no reluctance toreconstruct, correct, and amend the received Hebrew text as it suits them. Acommon result of this scholarly tampering with an ancient text is translationsthat frequently seem to bear little resemblance to the Hebrew original.These conflicting approaches are for the most part a direct consequence ofscholarship’s inability to identify the author or when he lived. In this work,Sicker adopts the widely neglected thesis that identifies the author of thebiblical work as Hyrcanus the Tobiad, who lived at the time of the transferof ancient Palestine from the Ptolemaic to the Seleucid empires in 198B.C.E., and was de facto ruler of Judea for a number of years before beingforced into exile and eventual suicide. Directly related to the family of thehereditary high priesthood, he was quite familiar with the rites and traditionsof Judaism, as well as with the Hellenistic culture that pervaded the areaduring the era in which he lived. As a result his thinking reflected anamalgam of both, neither of which provided satisfactory answers to thequestions he raised about the meaning of the life he led and the end to whichhe had been brought by circumstances entirely beyond his control. Whenthe biblical book is read with such a likely author in mind, many of theenigmas found in the work can be clarified, which is what Kohelet: TheReflections of a Judean Prince attempts to do.