The very strangeness of the work in its literary and religious context in the Bible is part of its fascination. The author’s mood of doubt and pessimism is one into which many reflective persons fall from time to time, and in which not a few of the more skeptical remain. At the same time, there is a deep wisdom even in Qoheleth’s melancholy reflections, and in the courage with which he affirms life’s values in the teeth of its brevity and frustrations, of the unalterable “givenness” of existence, and the surrounding dark. On his premise that God is unknowable by man, his conclusions are not easily proved wrong.
R.B.Y. Scott, Proverbs and Ecclesiastes (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1965), 193.