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 CHAPTER VII.

ECCLESIASTES AND ITS CRITICS (FROM A PHILOLOGICAL POINT OF VIEW).

By comparison with Ecclesiastes, the books which we have hitherto been studying may be called easy; at any rate, they have not given rise to equally strange diversities of critical opinion. A chapter with the above heading seems therefore at this point specially necessary. Dr. Ginsburg's masterly sketch of the principal theories of the critics down to 1860 dispenses me, it is true, from attempting an exhaustive survey. It is not the duty of every teacher of Old Testament criticism to traverse the history of his subject afresh, any more than it is that of the commentator as such to begin with a catena of the opinions of previous writers. Suffice it to call attention to two of the Jewish and two of the Christian expositors mentioned by Dr. Ginsburg, viz. Mendelssohn and Luzzatto, and Ewald and Vaihinger. seems important not so much by his results as by his historical position. His life marks an era in Biblical study, most of all of course among the Jews, but to some extent among Christians also. His Hebrew commentary on Koheleth deserves specially to be remembered, because with it in 1770 he broke ground anew in grammatical exegesis. To him, as also to , the object of Koheleth is to propound the great consolatory truth of the immortality of the soul, while, more in accordance with facts, describes it as being rather to combine