Time in the Book of Ecclesiates by Mette Bundvad

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

Reviewed by: Time in the Book of Ecclesiates by Mette Bundvad Russell L. Meek mette bundvad, Time in the Book of Ecclesiates (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). Pp. x + 240. $110. Time in the Book of Ecclesiastes is Mette Bundvad's revised and published dissertation, which she completed at Oxford University under John Barton (2013). In this work B. seeks to "show that Qohelet's exploration of time and temporal experience proves an excellent lens through which one may engage with this literary work" (p. 3). In this she is quite successful. The book begins with the typical critical questions such as the book's provenance and literary structure. Though B. agrees that Qoheleth's structure is quite difficult to grasp—"a jumble of different genres" in a book whose argument is "repetitive, circuitous, and contradictory" (p. 15)—she avers that the concept of time is a useful way to engage Ecclesiastes as a literary whole. Bundvad offers an overview of current and past scholarly discussions of time, which provides the framework for her own examination of Qoheleth's use of time as it relates to broader scholarly conventions. B.'s discussion quickly catches up readers unfamiliar with the study of time in the Hebrew Bible. She first treats the lexical approach to time, which examines the Hebrew concept of time in relation to its vocabulary for time and thus argues that the "Hebrew concept was to some extent more limited than ours" (p. 26, emphasis original). B. points out, however, that "There is in general very little meta-reflection in the Hebrew Bible. … However, the scarcity of meta-reflection does not warrant the conclusion that the writers did not possess … a concept of time or that their understanding of this concept was so limited that they could only apply it to concrete events and occurrences" (p. 31). Qoheleth, she argues, pushes back against this once-popular theory of the Hebrew view of time by "reflect[ing] on time as a theme in its own right" (p. 31). After examining both "process-thinking" and the Whorfian hypothesis (that the structure of a language influences the thought and behavior in a culture), B. concludes that "it is absolutely possible to examine the habitual use of temporal language as it appears in the various Hebrew Bible books" and that the biblical authors' "native language does not impose a cognitive deficiency" on them (pp. 42–43, italics in original). In chap. 3, B. examines 1:4-11 and the final poem on death and dying (12:1-7), a favorite of allegorists all around. Unsurprisingly, B. rejects the allegorical reading of 12:1–7 as "limited [to] part of this imagery's potential scope of meaning" (p. 72). B. argues that these two poems frame the Book of Ecclesiastes and set "world time"—the cyclical nature of the sea, the seasons, and the like—against "time as lived and experienced by the human being" (p. 73), with the final poem highlighting the constant human struggle against temporality. By reading these two poems together, then backing up to reflect on the rest of Qoheleth's statements on death and temporality in Ecclesiastes, B. has given readers a useful interpretive grid through which to examine his views on the human experience. In chaps. 4 and 5, B. first outlines Qoheleth's articulation of present time (chap. 4) and then turns to how the biblical author connects present time to the past and future (chap. 5). B. claims that, in Qoheleth's view only present time is truly accessible to humanity; past and future remain out of human reach. Thus, Qoheleth sees humans as bound to the present by inaccessibility to the past and future. Such boundedness leads, on the one hand, to human inability to act wisely ("we are unable to understand the larger, temporal framework within [End Page 310] which we live" [p. 113]) and, on the other hand, to isolation ("The sameness in time makes blind. It does not give clarity" [p. 114]). This blindness and boundedness, in turn, mean that meaning can be found only in the present. In chap. 5, B. highlights what is one of Qoheleth's most vexing problems...