Letras Inglesas

Seminario de literatura bíblica

Dra. Emma Julieta Barreiro

Sebastian Novoa Gam

Glimpses of Behavior: Reading Proverbs and Ecclesiastes as a form of ethos

In her Diccionario de Retórica y Poética, Helena Beristain defines ethos as an “affective state (a

frame of mind) that manifests as a certain degree of aesthetic satisfaction. It is the joy

(‘delectatio’) that poetry produces” (the translation is mine, 203). In the collective imagination,

the ethos also functions as an enunciation of the central values of a community, culture or state. I

believe that both the book of Proverbs and the book of Ecclesiastes are one of the first moments

of enunciation of ethos in the Old Testament.

In the Hebrew tradition, we find the book of Proverbs framed within the Ketuvim or

Scriptures –the third section of the Tanakh. Inside the Christian tradition, we find it framed

within what we know as Poetic Books along with Ecclesiastes, Psalms, Job and Songs.

The literary form present within both is the “wisdom song”. According to Christopher

Rowland, “the wisdom literature… describes the world as it is, not as it might be. On the basis of

experience, wisdom literature describes the type of conduct that might bring the person success”

(16). In the first chapter of Proverbs, the presumable deliverer of wisdom is King Solomon

himself: “THE proverbs of Solomon the son of David, king of Israel” (1:1). We can appreciate

the cultivation of a kind of conduct that enhances the attributes of the chosen people, that is, the

exaltation of wisdom:

To know wisdom and instruction; to perceive the words of understanding; To receive the

instruction of wisdom, justice, and judgment, and equity; To give subtilty to the simple, to the

young man knowledge and discretion. A wise man will hear, and will increase learning; and a
 man of understanding shall attain unto wise counsels: To understand a proverb, and the

interpretation; the words of the wise, and their dark sayings. (Prov.1:2,3,4,5,6)

In contrast with Proverbs, we find the speaker of Ecclesiastes to be a much more

pessimistic enunciator, “It is that kind of pessimism about predicting the outcome of human life

and the mystery of the divine purposes that also underlines books such as Qoheleth

(Ecclesiastes)…”(Rowland 16). We know that the speaker of this book is an entity called The

Preacher: “THE words of the Preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem” (Ecc. 1:1). The first

statement of the Preacher prefigures an indirect challenge to the previous notion of ethos

presented in Proverbs: “Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity”

(Ecc. 1:2). His narrative becomes obscure; his journey leaps form subject to subject, always

trying to get away from the vanity and the vexation of spirit that lay inside of all human

interaction with the material world, the others, and life itself. He redefines his approach to the

forms of attaining this particular Judaic ethos (i.e. the exaltation of wisdom) through a recurrent

auto-analysis of the implications of cultivating wisdom itself:

I communed with mine own heart, saying, Lo, I am come to great estate, and have gotten more

wisdom than all they that have been before me in Jerusalem: yea, my heart had great experience

of wisdom and knowledge. And I gave my heart to know wisdom, and to know madness and

folly: I perceived that this also is vexation of spirit. For in much wisdom is much grief: and he

that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow. (Ecc. 1:16,17,18)

In a sense, the pursuit of a totalizing ethos inside these two Poetic Books becomes

thwarted by the complexity of life itself, “where the point is to make the best of what one has,

and no to assume that everything will go plain” (Rowland 16) for “there is no remembrance of

the wise more than of the fool for ever; seeing that which now is in the days to come shall all be

forgotten. And how dieth the wise man? as the fool” (Ecc. 2:16).
Bibliography

Rowland, Christopher. “The Literature of the Bible”. Acceso Remoto.

The Bible. Authorized King James Version with Apocrypha. Great Britain: Oxford University Press,

2008.