Qoheleth’s Evaluation of Israel’s History

To what extent is it possible to read the book of Ecclesiastes as an evaluation of Israel’s history? This project tries to answer this question by investigating the intertextual relationship between Ecclesiastes and the history of Israel as described from Genesis to 2 Kings. There are three motivations why investigating this topic is profitable. First, there is a rich tradition of rabbinic interpretation which has extensively discussed the connection between Qoheleth and the Torah. Second, modern scholars have recently studied the intertextual relation between Ecclesiastes and a number of passages of historical books. Third, it would be interesting to examine the relationship between Ecclesiastes and the historical books from the perspective of the Reformed tradition, with its redemptive-historical reading of the Old Testament, for from a Christian perspective, Ecclesiastes is a part of the Old Testament canon.