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I'm not an expert at all, but your response made me curious as to why that (presumably humorous) aside would have been thrown in. Anyway, my research, such as
by itp 9y ago
I'm not an expert at all, but your response made me curious as to why that (presumably humorous) aside would have been thrown in.
Anyway, my research, such as it is, took me as far as the Wikipedia article on Ecclesiastes[0], which maybe provides soft support for the claim?
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.
Anyway, I hope that this won't discourage people from reading the entire thing, which I thought was well written and well worth the time.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecclesiastes#Canonicity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecclesiastes#Canonicity
- narag 9y agoI have no idea who wrote that in Wikipedia. My source was a Theology PhD about 35 years ago. Before maccabees there was no believe in afterlife, that came from Egypt and eastern cultures. Even in Jesus times, Sadducees didn't believe in afterlife.
- bambax 9y ago> a God who reveals and redeems, who elects and cares for a chosen people Yhwh is indeed the God of his own people, and fights alongside his people, against other peoples and their god(s). Sometimes he gets upset with his people and punishes them, usually very harshly (mass drowning, mass fires, getting them lost in the desert for generations, etc.) The role of prophets is mainly to try to talk God into being a little more lenient and maybe not kill everyone this time. The idea of a benevolent God is fairly recent. (Conversely, the argument that God doesn't exist because there is so much evil in the world is fairly weak. The God of the Old Testament doesn't have a problem with evil, he just wants his team to win.)