NOTE: This is the link to several dozen MS Sefaria Sheets about the work and lectures of Robert Alter: Robert Alter | Sefaria Collections
Alter is rightly considered among the greatest translators of any era. What is less known are the over 28 essays introducing all of the Bible and its parts. There are surveyed in the Robert Alter Sefaria MS Sheet Collection.
Alter's Essay on Qohelet in The Hebrew Bible:
[MS: It is indeed a radical text, so why has it survived in the canon that comes down to us and what meaning can it have.]
"The central enigma, then, of the Book of Qohelet is how this text of radical dissent, in which time, history, politics, and human nature are seen in such a bleak light, became part of the canon. " p.674
[MS: At p.677-678:]
"How, then, did such a book come to be included in the canon? The process of inclusion, it should be said, was not long in coming, for fragments a Qohelet found at Qumran indicate that it was already part of the library a Scripture there only a century or two after its composition ...
Some interpreters attribute its embrace by the shapers of the canon to the pious tilt it is given in the epilogue (12:9-14).
[MS: BUT- ] It has long been the scholarly consensus that the epilogue is the addition of an editor seeking to domesticate Qohelet's doctrinal wildness, ...
In any case it is surely attributing far too much naiveté to the ancient readers to imagine that a few dozen words of piety at the end would deflect them from seeing the subversive skepticism emphatically reiterated throughout the text.
We are unlikely ever to have a confident explanation of why Qohelet- or, for that matter, Job or Esther or the Song of Songs- entered the canon, but its inclusion suggests that the canon may not have been determined solely on the grounds of ideological and theological conformity.
In regard to its literary power and the uncompromising rigor of its observation of the human condition, this was clearly one of the most original texts produced in the biblical period, early or late. There must have been many Hebrew readers in the last two and a half centuries before the Common Era and on into the Common Era who were not willing to let go of Qohelet, who felt that it, somehow belonged in the anthology of texts--not quite yet a canon--that constituted the literary legacy of the nation.
They may well have felt this attachment to Qohelet despite the fact that it challenged long-cherished, notions about human destiny and the nature of reality. It is even possible that they embraced the book precisely because of the challenges it posed, for there was not a great deal of doctrinal consistency in the whole body of incipiently canonical texts, and the so-called biblical worldview, which is really a construct of later interpreters, was at this early moment far from a settled issue.
The pious epilogue should probably be seen not as a way of transforming the audience's understanding of the text but rather as a no more than hopeful rhetorical gesture, an effort to conclude the book with a seal of official approval unlikely to fool anyone about its actual contents.
What continues to engage the moral and philosophic imagination, as it surely must have done in Late Antiquity, is the writer who unblinkingly saw all human enterprise as herding the wind, who envisaged the same grim fate for rich and poor, for the righteous and the wicked, and who was led to question whether wisdom itself in the end had any advantage over foolishness."
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[MS: Alter’s honesty and modesty are always present in his work. Again, in his translation and Note on Qohelet, there is unswerving integrity. Beyond all considerations of faith or ideology, or some other noble goals, Alter insists on letting the texts speak for themselves. Alter’s integrity is reviewed in many Sheets in the Robert Alter MS Sefaria Sheet Collection.]
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Quotations are from The Hebrew Bible. W. W. Norton & Company.
[MS: Editing, emphasis and insertions or deletions are supplied. Copyrighted material]
