Rivalry and Resignation: Girard and Qoheleth 249 of example, in Job 34,14 Eliphaz ponders the possibilty should God “take his spirit (wjwr) back to himself”, the consequence will be that “all humankind will return to dust” (v. 15). Prov 16,2 speaks of divine judgement by appeal to the imagery of God weighing the spirits of humankind (hwhy twjwr ˆktw wyny[b ˚z vyaAykrdAlk). This is also the obvious meaning of the term in several occurrences in Qoheleth. In 3,19; 11,5; 12,7, jwr describes the animating principle of humanity that is given by God at birth and taken back by God at death. Similarly, in 8,8 jwr is paired with the time of death to express our inability to prevent death when it comes (18). My contention is that the meaning of jwr in the phrase, jwr tw[r is also to be understood as referring to the animating life force that comes from God to humankind, and that this is set in opposition to lbh in the first colon, which is used to describe the transient nature of human life. This reads the waw in the bicolon as disjunctive, and casts the phrase as an antithetical parallelism, which Qoheleth also uses in Qoh 7,4 and 10,2 (19). In this regard, the translation of jwr in the LXX merits mention. In Greek, two common words used to refer to the wind are a{nemo" and pneu'ma. Of these two, pneu'ma can also refer to one’s soul or spirit, analogous to the two uses of jwr in Biblical Hebrew. While LXX Qoheleth uses both a{nemo" and pneu'ma to render jwr throughout the book, pneu'ma is used exclusively in every instance of the bicolon under investigation here, as well as in the texts in which jwr clearly refers to the human spirit or the divine gift of life. This speaks to the probability that the LXX translator also understood jwr in the bicolon to refer to something other than the wind. Added to this is the fact that he chose a{nemo" to translate jwr in 5,15 and 11,4, where it clearly refers to the wind (20). The translator’s use of multiple Greek words to —————— Seow’s remark after citing examples from Wisdom Literature in which jwr means simply “wind”, is somewhat misleading: “In every case ‘wind’ indicates futility or meaninglessness” (Ecclesiastes, 122). One must be careful to read the phrase “In every case”, as referring only to the seven examples SEOW has cited from Proverbs and Job, and not to the entire corpus of Wisdom Literature. (18) The presence of death and battle in 8,8 speaks against translating jwr as “wind” in the verse (LOHFINK, Qoheleth, 106). (19) L. ALONSO SCHÖKEL, A Manual of Hebrew Poetics [Subsidia Biblica 11; Rome 1988] 85-94. Consequently, lbh should be added to rp[ and rçb as antonyms listed for jwr discussed by Fabry (TDOT XIII, 379), although Fabry reads lbh and jwr in Qoheleth as complementary, rather than disjunctive (374). (20) JARICK, Comprehensive Bilingual Concordance, 267-268.