or the Preacher, one of the canonical books of the Old Testament. The Hebrew word Koheleth, of which the above two titles are a translation, is of somewhat difficult etymology; but if the merely modern shade of meaning attached to the word preacher be avoided, there is no reason to abandon this its ancient title for the fanciful renderings, collector, assembly, academy, &c., which have been popular abroad.

The history of the interpretation of Ecclesiastes presents the same great features with that of the other books of Scripture. Of its admission into the canon there is not even the shadow of a doubt; although some of the learned Jews mentioned in the Talmud seem to have been haunted with scruples in regard to its heresy, its "contradictions," and its "materialism." From these Talmudists to Theodore of Mopsuestia, and from that period again till the Reformation, its orthodoxy remained generally unchallenged both in the synagogue and in the church. During the last and the present century it has shared the fate of all ancient documents at the hands of Continental Rationalism, and is now emerging from this its fiercest and apparently final ordeal.

The points under dispute are, severally, its unity and plan, its ethical characteristics, its date and authorship. Its unity is denied by the whole Wolfian school of critics; but their schemes of partition into dialogues and disjointed narratives, rival poems, literary discussions, ethical aphorisms, and unfinished practical essays, are more than mutually destructive. The peculiarity of the diction, and the unity of the subject, is too marked to admit of the possibility of divided authorship. In regard to the plan of the book; their rival theories are equally at fault. Between the scheme of Kaiser, who detects throughout historical and prophetic delineations of the characters and reign of the later kings, and that of Ewald and Hitzig, who recognise in it the utterances of incarnate wisdom, it may easily be imagined that there are intermediate hypotheses interminable. The most plausible ground for recognising a plurality of authors, and consequently a frequent divergence of plan in the book, lies in the abruptness of its transitions, which are in fact made without regard to logical accuracy or rigorous simplicity of method; but this can hardly be recognised as necessarily inconsistent either with a fixed plan or with a unity of authorship, since, as is the case with the Song of Solomon, it enters into the very conception of the book, that it should present its main theme abruptly from a variety of opposite points of view. The theme itself, which is the vanity of all earthly things, is never lost sight of; and however far the orbit of its illustration sweeps, there is ever a periodical return to this dreary central thought. So entirely, however, does the ethical value which we attach to it depend on the hypothesis which we hold in regard to its structure, that De Wette on one theory rejects the book entirely as unhinging the doctrine of final retribution, and Moses Stuart on another receives it as containing more explicit reference to this grand event than any other book of the Old Testament. If, as some have supposed, it be a mental autobiography of Solomon, in which he brings to light the Epicurean maxims that soothed and incited him in his career of folly and dissipation, the ethical difficulties vanish.

The date of Ecclesiastes is not so precisely determined by its diction as was at one time confidently supposed. Its alleged Hellenisms, at one time triumphantly paraded as the demonstration of its late origin, have been entirely eliminated by later scholars; and the rash assertion that it is coloured with the peculiar Greek philosophizing in regard to the chief good, has been successfully disproved. Its Chaldaisms, which have at least as great affinity to patriarchal as to modern Hebrew, have been reduced to some eight or ten instances. And taking into account the necessities, or even the eccentricities of philosophical language, it is not too much to say that these might have been written in the golden age of Hebrew literature. The political sketches in the book have also been employed with a view to ascertain its date. Setting out on the principle that the author is depicting the miseries of contemporary history, almost all the leading epochs of later Jewish history have been adduced as answering the description. The absence, however, of certain well-known features, such as the prevalence of idolatry, is fatal to such a theory; and it is somewhat remarkable that later writers have been compelled to abandon all except the terra incognita of Jewish history, and to regard the description as alone applicable to the time when the Holy Land was a mere Persian province. The researches of Kaiser, above alluded to, at least show that the delineations do not refer to any well-defined period.

They are in truth only vivid sketches of phenomena that are ceaselessly repeated in Eastern political history.

The authorship of Ecclesiastes, if not attributed to Solomon, must remain for ever a matter of uncertainty. All other names rest merely on conjecture. To those who regard Solomon's name as introduced merely as the representative of wisdom, it must on the one hand be conceded that such a practice was common with writers who flourished after the exile; but on the other hand it seems equally clear, that as the whole scope of the book points naturally to the real authorship of Solomon, the book of Ecclesiastes, if this authorship be disproved, must be ranked as at the best a pious forgery, and must be condemned to take its place with other apocryphal productions. Much, however, yet remains to be done in investigating the minutiae of this question. The affinities of Ecclesiastes in thought and style with the book of Proverbs are certainly as marked as the discrepancies of the two books in diction. The proverbial style in both is the same; and even the varieties of the diction, although they may seem to indicate that they are the production of different authors, cannot be adduced as proving that they were written at widely different epochs. The sketches are undoubtedly such as might have been anticipated from a king, who, in his own history and in his relation to foreign despotisms, had brought everything that was false in morality and false in politics within the circle of his own experience; and it seems strange that the incongruity of the sentiments should not have been detected by those who knew the social condition of the people in Solomon's reign far better than we can ever hope to do. The expression (i. 12), "I the preacher was king," does not decide the question of the authorship; it has evident reference to the testamentary character of the treatise, which, as the last of Solomon's productions, we might beforehand expect to be written in a dialect somewhat marked with foreign idioms. Twenty years of habitual intercourse with the representatives of foreign nations, whose languages, though distinct, had yet a very close resemblance to Hebrew, must have sensibly affected the dialect of the court; and to us it seems not unsuitable that the penitential acknowledgments of Solomon should be handed down to posterity in the broken dialect which was the very symbol of his self-degradation.

(Ecclesiastical (ecclesia, an assembly or meeting), pertaining or relating to the church; as ecclesiastical polity, jurisdiction, history, &c.)