Illuminating Qohelet through art and philosophy

Years ago, when I told my young son about a Bible commentary I was writing, he paused for a minute and then dryly commented, “So it’s a book about a book.” A humbling but apt assessment! If a Bible commentary is a book about a book, Qohelet: Searching for a Life Worth Living is a book about a book with pictures. It offers something quite different from usual commentaries: artistic renderings of the text alongside philosophical insights, all in conversation with interpretations ranging from ancient to modern.

The richness of this interdisciplinary approach compels us to take a new—or a first—look at the Hebrew scroll that was rendered “Ecclesiastes” in Greek, a term carried through into Christian tradition. The coauthors invoke a kaleidoscope of references in their interpretations: Hubble Space Telescope images, ancient artifacts, medieval Jewish poetry and liturgy, Shakespeare, scientific philosophy, rabbinic literature, recent Qohelet scholarship, and of course, Hebrew Bible references galore.

Debra Band is a visual artist whose similarly illuminated Song of Songs (The Song of Songs: The Honeybee in the Garden) caught my attention years ago, so I was eager to see her pictorial interpretation of my favorite sage. Menachem Fisch is a philosopher of science with emeritus status at Tel Aviv University and Goethe University Frankfurt and codirector of the Frankfurt–Tel Aviv Center for Religious and Interreligious Studies. He first became interested in Qohelet through the work of his Bible scholar father, Harold Fisch. As cousins, the coauthors, along with the elder Fisch posthumously contributing his translation of Qohelet, present us with a family treasure in this collaboration. The authors’ Jewish perspectives and familiarity with rabbinic texts provide a wealth of context that is too often absent from biblical commentaries.