Study of the wisdom literature in the Hebrew Bible and the contemporary cultures in the ancient Near Eastern world is evolving rapidly as old definitions and assumptions are questioned. Scholars are now interrogating the role of oral culture, the rhetoric of teaching and didacticism, the understanding of genre, and the relationship of these factors to the corpus of writings. The scribal culture in which wisdom literature arose is also under investigation, alongside questions of social context and character formation. This Companion serves as an essential guide to wisdom texts, a body of biblical literature with ancient origins that continue to have universal and timeless appeal. Reflecting new interpretive approaches, including virtue ethics and intertextuality, the volume includes essays by an international team of leading scholars. They engage with the texts, provide authoritative summaries of the state of the field, and open up to readers the exciting world of biblical wisdom.

Study of the wisdom literature in the Hebrew Bible and the contemporary cultures in the ancient Near Eastern world is evolving rapidly as old definitions and assumptions are questioned. Scholars are now interrogating the role of oral culture, the rhetoric of teaching and didacticism, the understanding of genre, and the relationship of these factors to the corpus of writings. The scribal culture in which wisdom literature arose is also under investigation, alongside questions of social context and character formation. This Companion serves as an essential guide to wisdom texts, a body of biblical literature with ancient origins that continue to have universal and timeless appeal. Reflecting new interpretive approaches, including virtue ethics and intertextuality, the volume includes essays by an international team of leading scholars. They engage with the texts, provide authoritative summaries of the state of the field, and open up to readers the exciting world of biblical wisdom.

Readers of texts come from all generations, from different contexts and with different agendas. This book gives a sample of what both ancient and contemporary readers have brought to the book of Ecclesiastes in the quest for illumination of the text and for their own enlightenment, often furnishing their own agenda. Debates over meaning are formed, shaped, and illuminated by the interpreters themselves. Part One looks at ancient interpreters and at their methods of approaching the text. Jewish and Christian interpreters alike sought to find meaning amongst some of the key puzzles of the book-why does the author call himself "the son of David" and appear to be Solomon when his pen name also seems to be Qoheleth? Why the contradictions in content? How did such an unorthodox book come to be canonized? How did the dualistic contemptus mundi interpretation of the vanity theme perpetuated by Jerome and others come to hold the field for so long? And how did Luther and the reformers seek to rectify that approach? These questions and others are addressed in this book, looking through the lens of past interpretation. Part Two acknowledges our increasing self-awareness of the importance of method in approaching biblical texts and turns to a sample of modern interpretations from familiar reading groups such as the ecologist, the animal theologian, the liberationist, the post-colonialist, and the feminist. It will be seen that different modern approaches often enlighten the interpretation of specific verses within Ecclesiastes and hence that no one method is a wholesale "solution" to interpretive concerns.