simply to subvert its authority in a different way. Such an interpretative method may increase the reader’s comfort level, but it can do great violence to the text. When, for example, Jerome interprets Ecclesiastes as a treatise aiming “to show the utter vanity of every [my italics] sublunary enjoyment, and hence the necessity of betaking one’s self to an ascetic life [my italics] devoted entirely to the service of God,”4 it seems obvious to us (although presumably not to Jerome) that the text is