258 Thomas Bolin double bind by advising that humanity ignore the wisdom which makes us God-like, i.e., a situation that may be construed as one of internal mediation that creates the situation of mimetic rivalry on the part of human beings. He stresses the pointlessness of this metaphysical desire by means of a poetic, gnomic expression that succinctly and euphonically expresses the gulf between humanity and God. The gnomic character of Qoh 1,14 calls to mind Greek phrases that also express human limitations in respect to the gods by means of sapiential speech, such as the maxims from Delphi: gnw'qi sauvton (“Know thyself”) and mhvden a\gan (“Nothing too much”), or the Orphic aphorism, sw'ma-sh'ma (“body-tomb”). One significant result of using Girard’s concept of mimetic desire to read Qoheleth is that it reveals the book to be an expression of one of the most common beliefs of ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean religious wisdom texts. Consequently, exegetes should pause before repeating the sensus communis of modern biblical scholarship that Qoheleth is written as a challenge to “traditional” wisdom literature or “orthodox” Israelite theology (51). It seems more probable to me that the vision of Qoheleth as the lone, counter-cultural skeptic, swimming against the religious current of his day, is a post- Enlightenment anachronism based on an idea of individual autonomy foreign to the world of ancient Israel. It is more fruitful to set Qoheleth against the backdrop of the rivalry between humanity and the divine, common in the religious visions of Babylon, Greece, and Israel. Doing so clarifies Qoheleth’s advice that humankind give up its illusory desire to be like God. St. Norbert College Thomas BOLIN 100 Grant St. De Pere, WI 54115 - USA (51) However, perhaps Whybray (“Qoheleth as Theologian”, 245) goes too far in the other direction when he sees Qoheleth “as a religious and theological work concerned to defend rather than attack the Jewish faith”.