Ecclesiastes - GA Barton - 1908.pdf

1 62 ECCLESIASTES
9 7 . Come
eat thy bread with joy]. The sudden transition leads
Siegfried to find the hand of another author here. That, however,
seems unnecessary. Qoheleth, like other men, could come
under the influence of various moods or various systems of thought.
Each could possess him in turn without preventing the return of
the other. Life has no outlook, its problems are insoluble, death
will end all, but enjoy sensation and the sunshine while it lasts,
this is his philosophy, cf,
2 24 12 -
3
22
5 18 8 15 . When a modern man
realizes how many different conceptions and moods he can
entertain, he finds fewer authors in a book like Qoheleth. Bread
. . . and wine]. These are often taken as the means of subsistence
or of hospitality, cf. Gn. i4 18
2y 28 28 Dt. 33 i S.
20 i6 25 18 6 Neh. 5
La. 2 12 Tobit 4 15 - 17
. Already God has accepted thy works]. The
thought apparently is, God, by the constitution of the world, has
left this as the only source of enjoyment, and this is evidence that
such a course is acceptable to Him. As Hubert Grimme pointed
out (Orient. Liter aturzeitung, VIII, col. 432^".), vvs. 7-9 are strik-
ingly paralleled in a fragment of the Gilgamesh epic, published by
Meissner in the Mitteilungen der vorderasiatischen Gesellscha/t,
1902, Heft i. The passage (col. Ill, 3^".) reads:
Since the gods created man,
Death they ordained for man,
Life in their hands they hold,
Thou, O Gilgamesh, fill indeed thy belly,
Day and night be thou joyful,
Daily ordain gladness,
Day and night rage and make merry.
Let thy garments be bright,
Thy head purify, wash with water;
Desire thy children, which thy hand possesses,
A wife enjoy in thy bosom,
Peaceably thy work (?)....
The argument here is so closely parallel to that of Qoheleth that
one can scarcely doubt but that he was influenced by the passage.
The Gilgamesh epic can have been influenced neither by Stoic
nor Greek thought. This passage shows that the combination of
pessimism and brightness which we find in Qoheleth, is thoroughly
Semitic, and, to the Semitic mind, congruous. See further above,
Introduction, 6 (2).