Thomas Bolin, «Rivalry and Resignation: Girard and Qoheleth on the Divine-Human Relationship», Vol. 86 (2005) 245-259
This article looks at the repeated gnomic phrase in the Book
of Qoheleth, "All is vanity and a chasing after wind" (NRSV) and reads it as a
disjunctive parallelism in which the terms lbh
and xwr denote mortality and the divine spirit,
respectively, thus showing the sense of the phrase to be, "All is mortal, but
strives for immortality". Using René Girard’s concept of mimetic rivalry
clarifies this reading of the proverb, and shows it to be a concise expression
of a major theme in the Book of Qoheleth, viz., the author’s thoughts on the
difference between humanity and God, understood as paradoxical relationship
based on both similarity and difference between humans and the divine. More
importantly, Girard helps to understand more deeply how and why Qoheleth views
human proximity with the divine as the cause of conflict and pain in human life.
Because this tension is also evident in numerous other biblical and
extra-biblical texts, caution must be exercised, in referring to the Book of
Ecclesiastes as a "radical" or "heterodox" writing.
250 Thomas Bolin
render a single Hebrew term in Qoheleth leads to some important
conclusions regarding the bicolon under investigation:
1) The translator understood there to be different meanings to jwr
and, in three instances, chose to translate it with a Greek term (a{nemo")
that refers specifically to the wind.
2) In the bicolon, where jwr is unanimously read by modern com-
mentators and translators as “windâ€, the LXX translator chose to use
pneu'ma instead of a{nemo" (21). This demonstrates that, at the least he
did not see the term as exclusively referring to the wind and, as I
maintain, shows actually that he understood jwr in the bicolon as a
reference to the life breath.
2. Qoheleth and the Divine-Human Relationship
Looking at the Book of Qoheleth as a whole, it is clear that
interpreting the recurring proverb, jwr tw[rw lbh lkh along the lines of
the hierarchy of immortal divinity over mortal humanity introduces
nothing new thematically into the book.
First, one notes that outside of the proverb under investigation
here, there are two instances in Qoheleth where the problem of the gulf
between God and humanity is expressed using both lbh and jwr. Qoh
3,19 dwells on the reality that because humans and animals are both
mortal, they both share the same jwr, and he attributes our common
fate with the animals to the fact that all is lbh (22). Our mortality shows
that the divine life does not stay with us forever, and this transitory
nature renders our existence no more advantageous than that of the
beasts. Similarly, the vivid description of the end of human life in Qoh
12 (23) culminates in vv. 7-8 with the image of the separation caused by
the dust of the human body returning to its elemental source in the
ground (hyhvk ≈rahAl[ rp[h bçyw) and the spirit returning to God
whence it came (hntn rva µyhlhahAla bwçt jwrhw). Immediately after
(21) F. VINEL, L’Ecclésiaste (La Bible D’Alexandrie 18; Paris 2002). The
Hexapla fragments of Aquila and Theodotion translate jwr in the bicolon with
anemo" (VINEL, Ecclésiaste, 107).
{
(22) F. KUTSCHERA, “Kohelet: Leben im Angesicht des Todesâ€, Das Buch
Kohelet. Studien zur Struktur, Geschichte, Rezeption und Theologie (ed. L.
SCHWEINHORST-SCHÖNBERGER) (BZAW 254; Berlin 1997) 363-376); F. LAURENT,
“L’homme est-il supérieur à la bête? Le doute de Qohélet (Qo 3, 16-21)â€, RSR 91
(2003) 11-43.
(23) Although Seow makes a strong case for reading 12,2-7 eschatologically
(“Qoheleth’s Eschatological Poemâ€, JBL 118 [1999] 209-234); overview in M.
FOX, “Aging and Death in Qohelet 12â€, JSOT 42 (1988) 55-77.
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