Qohelet\u27s Twists and Turns

When Elias Bickerman wrote a little volume called Four Strange Books of the Bible, Ecclesiastes was an easy choice for inclusion. As he remarks, Ecclesiastes has no known antecedents or spiritual posterity in Jewish thought. ¹ This is an exaggeration,² but even Qohelet\u27s successors, the Jewish sages of the rabbinic period, found Ecclesiastes questionably biblical. Thus in Leviticus Rabbah 28:1, R. Benjamin B. Levi remarks, They sought to suppress Ecclesiastes, for they found in it matters that tend toward the heretical. ³ The purpose of this article is to highlight what I think is a particularly significant facet of Ecclesiastes\u27 distinctive, and at first glance heretical, stance vis-á-vis the rest of biblical literature. This is Qohelet\u27s emphasis on the imagery of turning