A single book holds everything known of him, and it gives him a title rather than a name. He calls himself Qohelet, a Hebrew word built on the verb for gathering an assembly, so roughly "the one who convenes"; the Greek translators made it Ekklesiastes, and the King James Version calls him the Preacher. He also calls himself son of David and king in Jerusalem, and rabbinic tradition read him as Solomon, writing the book in his old age. Scholars conclude otherwise: an unnamed sage wrote it in the Persian or early Greek period, between about 450 and 180 BCE, in a Hebrew centuries later than Solomon's. This page uses the name the book gives.
What he wrote against was the confidence of the wisdom tradition he belonged to. The Book of Proverbs, Israel's collection of the elders' sayings, teaches that the diligent prosper, the righteous are rewarded and the wise outlast the fool. Qohelet tests that teaching on himself. Speaking as the king, he builds houses, plants vineyards, gardens and orchards, gathers silver and gold and keeps singers, and then weighs what all of it gained him. His verdict is hebel, breath or vapour, the word the King James Version renders as vanity. The royal voice falls away after the second chapter, and the speaker becomes an observer. He sees wickedness in the courts where judgment should be, the tears of the oppressed with no one to comfort them, and a God who is in heaven while people are on earth, so that their words before him should be few. The dead, he says, know nothing, and no one can tell whether a human spirit goes upward while an animal's goes down into the earth.
He does not end in despair. Eat your bread and drink your wine gladly, he tells the reader, live with the wife you love, and do with all your strength whatever your hand finds to do, because the grave holds no work and no knowledge. These are a person's portion, given by God. Scholars still disagree over how to read him. Some read a pessimist, others a teacher who rebuilds a modest meaning on the far side of disappointment. The historian Martin Hengel found a Greek outlook in him, and others compare him with the Stoics and Epicureans; scholars who date him to the Persian period find no Greek influence at all. A later hand closed the book with an epilogue that calls him a sage who taught the people and tells the reader to fear God and keep his commandments.
His readers have argued with him from the start. Ben Sira, a Jerusalem scribe writing around 180 BCE, appears to draw on him. The rabbis debated whether his book was holy at all, and the Talmud records that they kept it because it begins and ends with words of Torah. Medieval commentators explained why his name is grammatically feminine: the speaker, they said, named himself after Wisdom, which is feminine in Hebrew. Rashi and Abraham ibn Ezra, the great medieval Jewish commentators, read his closing poem on the failing house as an allegory of old age. In his Confession, written around 1880, Leo Tolstoy quoted Ecclesiastes at length, crediting the words to "Solomon, or whoever wrote those words", and set them beside the Buddha, Socrates and Schopenhauer as the plainest statements of the question that had brought him near suicide. Synagogues read the book every year at Sukkot, the autumn festival of booths.