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The Concept of Hebel in the Book of Ecclesiastes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

John E. McKenna
John E. McKenna
Affiliation:
Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, CA 91101
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Extract

Today scholars still struggle to apprehend the meaning of hebel (vanity) in the Book of Ecclesiastes. It has become recognized that Old Testament theologians like Walter Eichrodt, Gerhard von Rad, and Ronald Clements did not essentially integrate the Wisdom Tradition of ancient Israel into the development of their theologies. In his Tyndale lecture on the Old Testament of 1965, David Hubbard argued for a new sensitivity to the relationship that must exist between covenant and wisdom in the community of faith. A. Graeme Auld has insisted that the alienation of wisdom from covenant traditions has caused such acute problems in understanding the Old Testament that we are in danger of not grasping at all the relation between the Word of God and the Word of Man. These problems may be linked not only to the question about why the Book of Ecclesiastes was allowed into the Canon of Israel, but also to the very hearing we claim to possess of the revelation of the Word of God in the world and the way the world has actually been made to be. All this should tell us that the significance of the concept of hebel in the Book of Ecclesiastes requires a real clarification of profound consequence for our knowledge of God in the world.

Type
Research Article
Information
Scottish Journal of Theology , Volume 45 , Issue 1 , February 1992 , pp. 19 - 28
Copyright
Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 1992

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References

page 19 note 1 Auld, A. G. ‘Word of God and Word of Man: Prophecy and Canon’, in Ascribe to the Lord, FS for Craigie, P. C., eds., Eslinger, L. and Taylor, G., JSOT Press, Sheffield, 1988, pp. 232–251Google Scholar. Auld writes ‘The amazement that Ecclesiastes is part of the Old Testament is caught nicely in Gerhard von Rad's great Old Testament Theology where he talks of its writer “pitching his camp at the frontier of Jahwism” (p. 244).’

page 19 note 2 Hubbard, D. A., ‘The Wisdom Movement and Israel's Covenant Faith’, The Tyndale Old Testament Lecture, 1965Google Scholar, where the author's sensitivity to the dichotomies between wisdom and covenant traditions is articulated.

page 19 note 3 Auld, op. cit. where the point of the article is to contend for what we mean by the Word of God.

page 19 note 4 Gordis, R., Koheleth, Schocken Books, New York, 1968, pp. 39–42.Google Scholar

page 20 note 5 Schoors, A., ‘Koheleth’ ETL, t. 61, 1985, pp. 295–303.Google Scholar

page 20 note 6 Fox, M.V., ‘The Meaning of HEBEL for Qohelet’, JBL, 105/3, 1986, pp. 409–427.Google Scholar

page 20 note 7 Zimmerman, F., The Inner World of Qohelet, KTAV Publishing House, New York, 1973.Google Scholar

page 20 note 8 Gordis, op. cit., cf. pp. 112–121.

page 21 note 9 Whybray, R. N., Ecclesiastes, Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, 1989.Google Scholar

page 23 note 10 Torrance, T. F., Divine and Contingent Order, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1987.Google Scholar

page 24 note 11 Barth, K., Church Dogmatics, Vol. III.3, T. & T. Clark, Edinburgh, 1960, pp. 289–368.Google Scholar

page 25 note 12 I would refer my reader to the way people like W.Jim Neidhardt at New Jersey Institute of Technology are attempting to employ concepts discovered in the advance of modern scientific culture as theological constructs with the capacity to deal with the kind of dynamical and kinetic connections about which we would like to speak, (cf. Neidhardt, W. J., ‘The Creative Dialogue between Human Intelligibility and Reality …’ ATJ, Vol. 41, 2, Fall, 1986, pp. 59–83.).Google Scholar

page 28 note 13 Since this article was written, Roland Murphy has published on the term hebeland recognised its importance throughout the Old Testament. He also asserts that no one word can convey all the nuances of the term in Qohelet. He suggests that ‘incomprehensible’ is a better understanding of it than Fox's ‘irrational’, but without arguing, as I have here, for a positive grasp of its meaning. (Murphy, R.E., ‘On translating Ecclesiastes’, CBQ 53/4, October 1991, pp. 571–579.)Google Scholar