Week 22 Ecclesiastes
I’ve been thinking about who wrote Ecclesiastes. Was it Solomon? Or an unknown somebody else?
One reason people might figure Solomon wrote Ecclesiastes is because of the proverbs. Solomon was famous for writing proverbs and there are a bunch of them in Ecclesiastes.
I did a quick re-read and found 95 verses of proverbs. Since there’s roughly 220 verses in the whole book that means that Ecclesiastes is about 43% proverbial sayings:
• Wisdom is better than folly, just as light is better than darkness
• Better one handful with tranquility than two handfuls with toil
• When you make a vow to God, do not delay to fulfill it. He has no pleasure in fools
• Whoever loves money never has enough
• It is better to heed the rebuke of a wise person than to listen to the song of fools
• The quiet words of the wise are more to be heeded than the shouts of fools.
Sayings like these could be seamlessly flipped over into the book of Proverbs.
Anyway…I know that it’s easy to get tsunamied with the Preacher’s all is vanity messaging. But Ecclesiastes might (possibly) be a Book of Proverbs (as well as a Book of Depressive Gloom-&-Doom).
Note: quotes from Ecclesiastes 2:13 4:6 5:4 5:10 7:5 8:7 9:17 & 1:2. Added note: I think 43% is a low estimate. For instance 3:1-8 & 12:1-8 look to me like long illustrated-proverbs. If I add them the 43% jumps to more than 50%. (On the other hand maybe those two literary paragraphs aren’t proverbs at all.)