Qoheleth

“Vanity of vanities! All things are vanity!”

Thus speaks pessimistic Qoheleth, from yesterday’s readings at mass.

This intrigued me. I had not recalled anyone named Qoheleth in the Old Testament. And believe me, I’d remember a name like Qoheleth. That startling, conspicuous juxtapositioning of terrible Q with little o, poor little o, in the wrong place at the wrong time. And tell me – what horrible fate befell sycophantic u? Fawning, groveling, mindless u, always there when Q needs you, always ready, willing and able to do Q’s bidding? What went wrong? What did you do to make Q want to make you disappear?

Admit it: that “Qo” – so utterly foreign and alien to the English tongue – would not be something you or I would forget! No! How could we? How could anyone? A phoneme like that I’d remember, sure. Like I’d remember the first time I, in love, was betrayed. You don’t forget something like that, and you don’t forget the first time you make heart-stopping acquaintance with the Qo morpheme.

How maleficiently, malevolently Lovecraftian!

So – who is this Qoheleth?

I checked my Catholic Bible, RSV – and, yes, in the Book of Ecclesiastes, chapter 1, verse 1, I read:

“The words of David’s son, Qoheleth, king in Jerusalem”

Wait a minute. Did David have a son named Qoheleth? I know he had a son named Solomon, who, after much Romanesque machinations on the part of his mother, inherited the still-united kingdom of Israel. David had a bunch of other sons, most (maybe, some) of whom rebelled against him: Absalom and Adonijah are the two that come to mind. But who’s this Qoheleth?

Wait! There’s one of those miniature a’s right after the name! I scan down the page to the footer, where it helpfully suggests to me: see Introduction.

I skim through the five-paragraph Introduction to Ecclesiastes on the previous page. Aha! “Qoheleth is a Hebrew word meaning, perhaps, ‘one who convokes an assembly.’ ” (As an aside, how loaded is that word perhaps?) Ecclesiastes is the Greek translation of the word Qoheleth. Hmmm.

Further on, it informs me: “The author of the book was a teacher of popular wisdom. Qoheleth was obviously only his literary name. Because he is called ‘David’s son, king of Jerusalem,’ it was commonly thought that he was King Solomon. Such personation, however, was but a literary device to lend greater dignity and authority to the book – a circumstance which does not in any way impugn its inspired character.”

Ah. So “Qoheleth”, which means, perhaps, Assembly-Convoker, or more modernly, Preacher or Teacher according to my two other (Protestant) Bibles, is a pseudonym. Rather like the “Publius” used by the trio of authors of the Federalist Papers. On reflection, I kinda like that. Gives the most depressing book in the Bible a dangerous magnetic quality.

Regardless, that’s just an awesome word, no matter what language it appears.