Qoheleth and Postmodernism

Doug Ingram suggests in his 2004 Grove Book study of Ecclesiastes that the book has a peculiarly postmodern emphasis on the ambiguity of the world and human life. Pointing to the proliferation of studies of Ecclesiastes over the past decade and a half, he writes that while modern readers find Ecclesiastes’ apparent lack of structure and clarity frustrating, postmoderns revel in those same qualities. I don’t think Ecclesiastes is quite as ambiguous as Ingram suggests, and also think (as Ingram himself notes) that the book poses riddles to force the reader to wrestle with the texts. Ingram is, however, quite right to see analogies between the perspective of Ecclesiastes and some of the themes of postmodern writing – death, elusiveness, oppression, frustration of human control.

Beyond that, what’s intriguing is that Ingram also notes that Solomon uses the verb “give” with God as the subject (counting 12:11) 14 times in the book. Solomon already works with the “postmodern” categories of gift and gratitude against the background of a “postmodern” description of the world as vapor. Of course, there’s a world of difference between “es gibt” and “God gives”; but the pronounced emphasis on God as giver is striking.