Dialogues with Kohelet - The Book of Ecclesiastes • Translation and Commentary

"[Perry offers] a coherent and comprehensive interpretation of the Book of Kohelet (Ecclesiastes), a book that has elicited widely varying interpretive responses over the centuries. He takes up the view, from time to time argued, that the book presents conflicting points of view, thesis and antithesis, and fashions a distinctive translation/interpretation along these lines. One of the distinguishing and impressive features of his work is that he presses his interpretive strategy with rigor and insists on working out the details. Thus the translation is an important part of his book since it holds both Perry and his reader, once launched on this approach, to the whole text. The result is a dialogical reading of Kohelet that makes an important contribution to biblical scholarship, radical in the thoroughness with which it develops the dialogical approach yet securely connected with various lines of traditional biblical interpretation of the book. Indeed, in some ways his commentary resembles Rabbinic midrash."
(David M. Gunn, Columbia Seminary)

Kohelet is known in world literature as the source of two messages. On the one hand, it is a handbook of world-weariness and pessimism: "All is vanity." On the other, it asserts that all things have their right time, "a time to live, and a time to die." But these two messages are contradictory, for if all is vain, then there is no need to reflect on the proper time for planting and dancing and laughing.