Why Kohelet Rabbah Will Not Let Solomon's Voice Stand Alone

Most readers picture Solomon, the supposed author of Ecclesiastes, as the solitary king musing on vanity. Kohelet Rabbah, the rabbinic midrash on Ecclesiastes compiled in late aggadic Palestine around the seventh or eighth century, will not allow that solitude to stand.

In Kohelet Rabbah, every verse from Solomon's pen turns out to be in conversation with someone else. With David the father who completed his son's sentences. With Torah partners who lifted each other up. With righteous figures rescued from the verse's harsh surface. With a wise woman who outranked one of David's generals. Solomon, in the midrash, is never really speaking alone. Every line he writes is half of a dialogue.

Four passages illustrate the pattern.

The Father Who Completed His Son's Sentences

Kohelet Rabbah 1:1 opens with the most quoted line in Ecclesiastes. Vanity of vanities, said Kohelet; vanity of vanities, everything is vanity. The rabbis pause on the Hebrew word hevel, breath or vapor, and ask exactly which kind of breath Solomon means.

Rabbi Huna, in the name of Rabbi Acha, observes: David, the father, made a statement and did not explain it. Solomon, the son, explained it. Then Solomon made a statement and did not explain it, and David, the father, had already explained it.

David said in Psalm 144:4, Man is like hevel. To which hevel is man compared? If to the hot breath of an oven, that has substance. If to the breath of a stove, that has substance. So which? David did not clarify. Solomon arrived centuries later, in Ecclesiastes 1:2, and completed the sentence. Hevel havalim, breath of breaths. The vapor of vapor. The kind of hevel that holds nothing.

The midrash treats the two verses as a single utterance separated by generations. Solomon did not invent the question. He answered his father's. The father and the son, as Kohelet Rabbah hears it, were writing a single book on opposite ends of a hundred years.

The Partners Who Lifted Each Other in Torah

Kohelet Rabbah 4 applies the same logic to a different verse. Two are better than one (Ecclesiastes 4:9). The midrash refuses to read the line as general wisdom about cooperation. It reads it as a specific instruction about Torah study.

Two who labored in Torah together, the rabbis teach, are better than one who studies alone. If they fall, the one will lift the other, the verse continues. The midrash translates: if one of them forgets a halakha, the other will restore it. And the threefold thread will not be quickly severed. The third strand is the rabbi who corrects them both when they err.

Read this against the David-and-Solomon completion at the head of the book and the pattern emerges. Kohelet Rabbah reads Solomon as a king whose verses, in the midrash, already assume that wisdom is not a soloist's craft. The chain runs from the Psalmist-king who speaks first, to the Ecclesiastes-king who completes him, to the Torah partners who lift each other, to the rabbi who corrects them both. Wisdom in this collection is a chain.

The Wicked Whose Honors Did Not Outlast Them

The cluster's hardest verse comes at Ecclesiastes 8:10. So I saw the wicked buried and come; they would go from a holy place, but would be forgotten in the city where they acted like that. The Hebrew is knotted. Kohelet Rabbah 8 takes the knot and asks who exactly the verse is describing.

Rabbi Yehuda bar Simon proposes the dry bones of Ezekiel 37, but the verse calls them wicked, and Ezekiel's dead were righteous. He proposes the son of the widow of Tzarephath (1 Kings 17), but the verse calls them buried, and the boy was never buried. He proposes Tzidkiya ben Kenaana the false prophet who incited Ahab. The midrash works through candidate after candidate, refusing to settle for a generic reading.

The procedure itself is the teaching. Ecclesiastes does not deal in abstract types. Every wicked in the book, the rabbis insist, has a name. Every righteous in the book has a face. The verse cannot be allowed to dissolve into generality. The midrash pairs each line with a specific historical figure who can be cross-examined.

The Wise Woman Who Outranked the General

The final passage answers the cluster's structural question. Who exactly is the partner the verse is in dialogue with? Kohelet Rabbah reads Ecclesiastes 9:18, wisdom is better than instruments of battle, and identifies the parties.

The wisdom in the verse, the midrash says, is the wisdom of Serah bat Asher, the long-lived daughter of Jacob's son who appears across rabbinic tradition as a holder of ancient knowledge. The instruments of battle are the siege engines of Yoav, King David's commander. The setting is 2 Samuel 20:16, when Yoav is besieging the city of Abel of Beth-Maacah to capture the rebel Sheba ben Bichri.

A wise woman calls down from the wall. Come close to here, she says. The midrash hears, in that come close, an indictment. Yoav is far away because Yoav is far from Torah. The Hebrew name Yoav contains av, father. You shorten, the woman tells him. You shorten the lives of the people. You do not correspond to your name. Your king is not a Torah king either. The Torah commands that you call to a city for peace before you wage war against it (Deuteronomy 20:10).

She wins the argument. Yoav backs down. Sheba's head is delivered by negotiation. No siege engine is fired. Solomon's later verse about wisdom outranking weapons, the midrash teaches, is a memorial to this woman from Abel who held the line by Torah alone against the army of her own king.

Why the Voices in Ecclesiastes Travel in Pairs

Read the four passages together and the project of Midrash Rabbah on Ecclesiastes comes into focus. Kohelet Rabbah refuses to let the apparent finality of the hevel verses stand as the final word.

The opening verse on vanity is paired with David's earlier verse on the same theme. The verse on toil is paired with the verse on study partnership. The verse on the buried wicked is paired with specific named figures from the historical record. The verse on wisdom and warfare is paired with a wise woman on a wall.

Every line in Ecclesiastes that sounds final, as Kohelet Rabbah hears it, is in dialogue with another voice that softens it, completes it, or contradicts it. The book of vanity is not a monologue. It is a record of a conversation Solomon was having with David, with the Torah partners of every generation, with the named righteous he could not forget, and with the wise woman of Abel who proved his thesis correct.