Jerome composed his Commentarius in Ecclesiasten in Bethlehem around 389, shortly after settling into the monastic community he and Paula had founded there. The preface tells its own origin story. Some five years earlier in Rome he had read Ecclesiastes with Paula's daughter Blesilla, hoping to draw her toward contempt of the world, and had promised her a commentary. Blesilla died in 384 before he could write it, and the finished work is dedicated instead to her mother Paula and her sister Eustochium as a debt paid to the dead. It is also a methodological landmark. Jerome announces that he has followed no one's authority but has translated from the Hebrew, keeping to the wording of the Septuagint where it does not stray far from the original and drawing on Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion where it helps. This is the first commentary he built on the Hebrew text, the working ground for the approach that would produce the Vulgate.
The commentary proceeds verse by verse, and its interpretive program is set at the start. Jerome reads Ecclesiastes as Solomon's teaching for the middle stage of the spiritual life: Proverbs instructs the beginner in conduct, Ecclesiastes teaches the detachment that sees the world's goods as fleeting, and the Song of Songs admits the perfected soul to union with God. The refrain of vanity he examines philologically, noting Aquila's rendering of the Hebrew hebel as vapor, so that the book's judgment on creation is not that it is evil but that it is thin and passing. The passages commending eating, drinking, and enjoyment he refuses to hand over to Epicurean readings; the true food and drink are the bread of Scripture and the sacrament, and the enjoyment is of labor done in God. The closing portrait of old age in chapter twelve he unfolds as an extended allegory of the failing body. Throughout he weaves in what he learned from a Jewish teacher, including the tradition that the book nearly fell out of the canon for its apparent contradictions and was saved by its final charge to fear God and keep his commandments.
The work mattered because it fixed the Latin church's way of hearing Ecclesiastes for a thousand years. The medieval contemptus mundi literature, the monastic reading of Solomon's three books as a ladder of ascent, and later Latin commentaries on the text all descend from it. It is also one of the clearest windows onto Jerome at the moment he committed himself to Hebraica veritas, arguing with the Greek versions and with Jewish exegesis in the same breath.
Who should read this: readers who want to see how a single biblical book was turned into a manual of spiritual detachment, and students of the history of exegesis who need Jerome's method in its earliest form. It is not a modern literary reading of Qoheleth, and anyone looking for engagement with the book's skepticism on its own terms will find Jerome determined to resolve it rather than sit with it.
Commentary on Ecclesiastes
by Jerome
For For students of Jerome's exegesis at its best: his first commentary from the Hebrew, written for Paula and Eustochium, reading Qoheleth's 'vanity' as contempt of the world; Latin only.
Jerome composed his Commentarius in Ecclesiasten in Bethlehem around 389, shortly after settling into the monastic community he and Paula had founded there. The preface tells its own origin story. Some five years earlier in Rome he had read Ecclesiastes with Paula's daughter Blesilla, hoping to draw her toward contempt of the world, and had promised her a commentary. Blesilla died in 384 before he could write it, and the finished work is dedicated instead to her mother Paula and her sister Eustochium as a debt paid to the dead. It is also a methodological landmark. Jerome announces that he has followed no one's authority but has translated from the Hebrew, keeping to the wording of the Septuagint where it does not stray far from the original and drawing on Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion where it helps. This is the first commentary he built on the Hebrew text, the working ground for the approach that would produce the Vulgate.
The commentary proceeds verse by verse, and its interpretive program is set at the start. Jerome reads Ecclesiastes as Solomon's teaching for the middle stage of the spiritual life: Proverbs instructs the beginner in conduct, Ecclesiastes teaches the detachment that sees the world's goods as fleeting, and the Song of Songs admits the perfected soul to union with God. The refrain of vanity he examines philologically, noting Aquila's rendering of the Hebrew hebel as vapor, so that the book's judgment on creation is not that it is evil but that it is thin and passing. The passages commending eating, drinking, and enjoyment he refuses to hand over to Epicurean readings; the true food and drink are the bread of Scripture and the sacrament, and the enjoyment is of labor done in God. The closing portrait of old age in chapter twelve he unfolds as an extended allegory of the failing body. Throughout he weaves in what he learned from a Jewish teacher, including the tradition that the book nearly fell out of the canon for its apparent contradictions and was saved by its final charge to fear God and keep his commandments.
The work mattered because it fixed the Latin church's way of hearing Ecclesiastes for a thousand years. The medieval contemptus mundi literature, the monastic reading of Solomon's three books as a ladder of ascent, and later Latin commentaries on the text all descend from it. It is also one of the clearest windows onto Jerome at the moment he committed himself to Hebraica veritas, arguing with the Greek versions and with Jewish exegesis in the same breath.
Who should read this: readers who want to see how a single biblical book was turned into a manual of spiritual detachment, and students of the history of exegesis who need Jerome's method in its earliest form. It is not a modern literary reading of Qoheleth, and anyone looking for engagement with the book's skepticism on its own terms will find Jerome determined to resolve it rather than sit with it.
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