Ecclesiastes - GA Barton - 1908.pdf

62 ECCLESIASTES
Woe unto thee, O land, whose king is a child,
And whose princes feast in the morning.
Happy art thou, O land, whose king is well-born
And whose princes feast at the proper time,.
As Hitzig has seen, v. 16 probably refers to the years after the
reign of Ptolemy V had begun, when Agathoclea and her brother
were the favorites in power (Justin, XXX, i), when revelry flour-
ished, and when Antiochus III (the Great) at the height of his
power was prosecuting those wars which, after inflicting much
suffering upon them, robbed Egypt of her Palestinian dominions.
Possibly, though it is by no means probable (see notes on 14 ff
9 ), the
reference to the city delivered by a wise man from the siege of a
14 - 16
powerful king (Q ) is a- reference to some incident of the wars of
"
Antiochus with Egypt. Probably Happy art thou, O land,
whose king is well-born and whose princes feast at the proper time,"
is Qoheleth's welcome of the strong rule of Antiochus III. Josephus
tells us (Ant. xii, 3") that the Jews of their own accord went
over to him, and welcomed him to Jerusalem, assisting him to take
the citadel from the Egyptians. This passage apparently reflects
the sentiments of that welcome. Qoheleth was, then,
not com-
pleted before 198 B.C. Its use by Ben Sira, on the other hand,
makes it impossible that it should have been written much later
than that year.
On the whole, vague as these historical allusions are, they make
it probable that Qoheleth did not finish his book until after the
conquest of Antiochus III, about 198 B.C. Slight as the data are,
they lead us with considerable confidence to place this work just
at the end of the period which above we held open for it, if not to
name the very year in which it was composed. This agrees with
the judgment of Hitzig, Tyler, Cornill and Genung.
The last of the third and the beginning of the second century
/B.C. forms a fitting background for such a work as Ecclesiastes.
The century which followed the death of Alexander was a trying
century for the whole East, but especially so for Palestine. Pos-
sessed by the Ptolemies, but claimed by the Seleucidae, Palestine
found herself in the precarious position of an apple of discord.
The gratitude which Seleucus I felt toward Ptolemy I for the aid