Aantekeningen bij de Bijbel: Prediker 4:16

Prediker 4:16

Tijdschrift, Journal of Hebrew Scriptures (JHS), [], Volume 1: Article 4 (1997) Michael V. Fox, What Happens in Qohelet 4:13-16.; A reexamination of the anecdote in Qoh 4:13-16 supports the following understanding: There was a succession of four protagonists: an old but foolish king; youth1, who came forth from prison; youth2, a poor man born in the latter's reign; and youth3, who is not an individual but whichever young man may come next in line. Wisdom is effective but its accomplishments undermined by the fickleness of public favor and memory.

Tijdschrift, Biblical Studies on the Web, [], Thomas BOLIN, Rivalry and Resignation: Girard and Qoheleth on the Divine-Human Relationship , Vol. 86(2005) 245-259.
This article looks at the repeated gnomic phrase in the Book of Qoheleth, "All is vanity and a chasing after wind" (NRSV) and reads it as a disjunctive parallelism in which the terms lbh and xwr denote mortality and the divine spirit, respectively, thus showing the sense of the phrase to be, "All is mortal, but strives for immortality". Using René Girard's concept of mimetic rivalry clarifies this reading of the proverb, and shows it to be a concise expression of a major theme in the Book of Qoheleth, viz., the author's thoughts on the difference between humanity and God, understood as paradoxical relationship based on both similarity and difference between humans and the divine. More importantly, Girard helps to understand more deeply how and why Qoheleth views human proximity with the divine as the cause of conflict and pain in human life. Because this tension is also evident in numerous other biblical and extra-biblical texts, caution must be exercised, in referring to the Book of Ecclesiastes as a "radical" or "heterodox" writing