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Qohelet and His Contradictions is unavailable, but you can change that!

Biblical scholar Michael V. Fox seeks to address the complexities and so-called “absurdities” of Ecclesiastes, or “Qohelet,” the Hebrew word for the preacher. He focuses not on resolving the contradictions, but on seeing them as part of the overall structure and meaning of the book. Fox gives an in-depth introduction to the historical exegetical studies of Ecclesiastes and explains his own...

The lesson of the Catalogue of Times (3:1–9) is not that everything has an opportune time, a time one should discover and choose for action. It is hard to say that birth, death, and losing have an “opportune” time, and in any case such occurrences are not directed at producing any particular benefit for the person undergoing them. The “rightness” or “opportuneness” of a particular time is not at issue here. The teaching of 3:1–9 is rather that the occurrence of all events is beyond human control,
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