Did Qoheleth Believe in an Afterlife?

Abstract

Abstract Few ancient writers have written more poignantly of death’s finality than Qoheleth. Yet in Ecclesiastes 3:21 the sage asks a question that some scholars have taken to intimate at least a tinge of eschatological optimism on his part, purportedly under the influence of Hellenistic notions of the soul’s immortality. This paper offers an alternative to this ‘afterlife interpretation’ by arguing that the verse is most coherently read through a traditional Hebrew anthropology and conception of death without reference to Hellenistic influence. So read, the verse’s use of רוּחַ in fact makes no reference to a ‘soul’ or its afterlife, and we therefore have little reason to think Qoheleth was so much as agnostic regarding any form of conscious post-mortem existence. The paper further examines not only additional relevant texts in Ecclesiastes but also texts within later Hellenistic Jewish wisdom—Ben Sira, Wisdom of Solomon, and Pseudo-Phocylides. While Hellenistic notions of the soul and immortality would infiltrate Jewish sapiential thought through the latter two of these authors, their assumed anthropology evidences an intellectual genealogy that merely supplemented, rather than supplanted, the inherited Hebrew beliefs. They therefore lend credence to the likelihood that Qoheleth’s notion of the רוּחַ in Eccl. 3:21 was thoroughly traditional.