Ecclesiastes
in Abingdon Old Testament Commentaries
Publisher
Abingdon Press
Published
4/1/2017
ISBN-13
9781501837579
An up-to-date, readable commentary on the book of Ecclesiastes, illustrating its relevance for modern readers.
The Abingdon Old Testament Commentaries provide compact, critical commentaries on the books of the Old Testament for the use of theological students and pastors. The commentaries are also useful for upper-level college or university students and for those responsible for teaching in congregational settings. In addition to providing basic information and insights into the Old Testament writings, these commentaries exemplify the tasks and procedures of careful interpretation, to assist students of the Old Testament in coming to an informed and critical engagement with the biblical texts themselves.
The present volume gives an up-to-date, readable commentary on the book of Ecclesiastes. The commentary covers critical issues section by section while emphasizing the larger theological and literary issues in Ecclesiastes and illustrating its relevance for modern readers.
The Abingdon Old Testament Commentaries provide compact, critical commentaries on the books of the Old Testament for the use of theological students and pastors. The commentaries are also useful for upper-level college or university students and for those responsible for teaching in congregational settings. In addition to providing basic information and insights into the Old Testament writings, these commentaries exemplify the tasks and procedures of careful interpretation, to assist students of the Old Testament in coming to an informed and critical engagement with the biblical texts themselves.
The present volume gives an up-to-date, readable commentary on the book of Ecclesiastes. The commentary covers critical issues section by section while emphasizing the larger theological and literary issues in Ecclesiastes and illustrating its relevance for modern readers.
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Reviews
DavidH
May 8, 2026
May 8, 2026
Duncan's AOTC Ecclesiastes (2017) offers genuine contributions—her case for retaining "vapor" as a concrete metaphor for hebel is well argued, and her literary analyses are often perceptive—but the commentary is undermined by a systematic theological skew. Her cumulative portrayal of God trends toward the adversarial: God has "stacked the deck" against humanity, "withheld information," and "created barriers to human insight," language that goes well beyond the text's own wrestling with divine inscrutability and that Murphy (WBC) and Krüger (Hermeneia) explicitly warn against (Murphy: "It is a mistake to characterize Qoheleth's God as a 'distant despot'"). This trajectory is reinforced by several interlocking exegetical choices: she reads ḥōṭēʾ in 2:26 as a non-moral category, making God's distribution of blessings appear arbitrary (contra Bartholomew's strong counter-argument in the BCOT); she narrows "fear God" toward existential dread of an opaque sovereign rather than the richer wisdom-tradition concept of relational and covenantal reverence; and she grounds the joy passages more in courageous human acceptance of mortality than in grateful reception of divine gifts, despite the text's repeated "from the hand of God" language. Her heavy reliance on Camus and existentialist philosophy as an interpretive lens, while interesting, tends to secularise the book's theology: what gets noticed is confrontation with mortality and the limits of existence, while what gets minimised is the positive theological content—God as giver of good gifts, creation as fundamentally good, and the enjoyment refrains as genuine affirmations of divine generosity rather than consolation prizes wrested from the void. As Bartholomew warns, Ecclesiastes is wisdom literature rooted in the fear of YHWH, not a proto-existentialist manifesto; the book may resonate with existentialist themes, but making existentialism the hermeneutical key reverses the proper order. Duncan's reading also harbours an unresolved internal contradiction: she affirms that food, drink, and enjoyment are "from the hand of God" (2:24), while simultaneously arguing that God has "stacked the deck against humanity"—yet if God is the generous source of life's good things, the language of rigging the game is at best misleading, and Duncan never adequately reconciles these two portraits. Most problematically, she treats the canonical epilogue (12:13–14) as "fundamentally at odds with the temper of the book" and is explicitly "wary of allowing this voice the last word"—effectively marginalising the conclusion that calls for fearing God and keeping his commandments. Readers will benefit from her literary observations but should be aware that her theological reading is notably darker than what the consensus of scholarship across critical (Seow, Krüger, Crenshaw), evangelical (Bartholomew, Longman, Enns, Kidner, Garrett), Catholic (Murphy, Lohfink), and Jewish (Fox) traditions would support, and should supplement accordingly.