“No other book within the Bible…is as intensely personal as Koheleth”

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No other book within the Bible, and few outside of it in world literature, are as intensely personal as Koheleth.  To be sure, he can be properly understood only within the framework of the intellectual life of ancient Israel, which is, itself, a distinctive part of the larger culture-pattern of the ancient Near East.  Nonetheless, his vision of life is definitely his own, the reaction of his personality to the world about him, individual in content and unique in expression.

Robert Gordis, Koheleth – The Man and His World: A Study of Ecclesiastes, 3rd ed. (Shocken Books: New York, 1968), 75.

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