The presence of Ecclesiastes in the Bible is something of a puzzle,
as the common themes of the Hebrew canon—a God who reveals and redeems, who elects and cares for a chosen people—are absent from it, which suggests that Kohelet had lost his faith in his old age. Understanding the book was a topic of the earliest recorded discussions (the hypothetical
Council of Jamnia in the 1st century CE).
One argument advanced at that time was that the name of Solomon carried enough authority to ensure its inclusion; however, other works which appeared with Solomon's name were excluded despite being more orthodox than Ecclesiastes.
[34] Another was that the words of the epilogue, in which the reader is told to fear God and keep his commands, made it orthodox; but all later attempts to find anything in the rest of the book that would reflect this orthodoxy have failed. A modern suggestion treats the book as a dialogue in which different statements belong to different voices, with Kohelet himself answering and refuting unorthodox opinions, but there are no explicit markers for this in the book, as there are (for example) in the Book of Job.
Yet another suggestion is that Ecclesiastes is simply the most extreme example of a tradition of skepticism, but none of the proposed examples match Ecclesiastes for a sustained denial of faith and doubt in the goodness of God. Martin A. Shields, in his 2006 book
The End of Wisdom: A Reappraisal of the Historical and Canonical Function of Ecclesiastes, summarized that "In short, we do not know why or how this book found its way into such esteemed company".
[35]
too late to edit.
