son of david is traditionally said to be the author of ecclesiastes.
who is traditionally said to be the author of ecclesiastes?
son of david
ecclesiastes 3





























ecclesiastes 3 is the third chapter of the book of ecclesiastes in the hebrew bible or the old testament of the christian bible. the book contains philosophical speeches by a character called 'qoheleth' (="the teacher"; "koheleth" or "kohelet"), composed probably between 5th to 2nd century bce. peshitta, targum, and talmud attribute the authorship of the book to king solomon. the newcity editor's letter cites the first part of this chapter (verses 1-8) as "one of the world’s earlier and best-known poems".





























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the original text was written in hebrew. this chapter is divided into 22 verses.





























section::::text.:textual witnesses.
ecclesiastes 3
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 then was that the name of solomon carried enough authority to ensure its inclusion, but other works which appeared with solomon's name were excluded despite being more orthodox than ecclesiastes. 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. "in short, we do not know why or how this book found its way into such esteemed company," summarizes martin a. shields in his 2006 book "the end of wisdom: a reappraisal of the historical and canonical function of ecclesiastes"
ecclesiastes