Ecclesiastes or The preacher Author:Unknown Author Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: posing as a critic, would have considered himself responsible. To these we may add, as negative evidence, the absence of reference to any characteristic featu... more »res of Israelitish history in Solomon's day, or to the conspicuous achievements of that king in the shape of sacred and secular buildings. (iii.) The tone of the Book and the character of its teaching not only suggest the period when the Persian Empire had been overthrown, and Alexander the Great's successors had established Greek culture throughout the civilised world,1 but also bear distinct traces of Stoic and Epicurean philosophy. Of the tenets of the former school we are reminded by the laments over the shortness and vanity of man's life, and of his endless toil and endeavour after pleasures,2 by the linking of human folly with madness,3 by the acceptance of destiny as inevitable,4 by the doctrine that history consists in ever - recurring cycles of the same events.6 As, however, the Stoic philosophy was of Eastern, rather than Greek origin, the argument as to date from the appearance of itstenets in the Book, is less weighty than that drawn from the indications of Epicurean forms of thought. 1 Other expressions point in the same direction—e.g. the reference to racing in ix. II. See I Mace. i. 14; 2 Mace, iv. 9-14. "i. 5-7, II ; iii. 14, 15. ' i. 17 ; ii. 12; vii. 25 ; x. 13. 4 viii. 8; ix. n. Epicureanism in its popular acceptation appears, perhaps, most plainly in such a passage as chap. ii. 24, "There is nothing better for a man than that he should eat and drink, and that he should make his soul enjoy good in his labour."1 But the tenets of that school also afford parallels for the writer's comments on human weakness and human disorder,2 and on the vanity and brevity of the life of man.3 His rem...« less