Qoheleth’s Hope

Pessimist! Hedonist! Skeptic! Fatalist! Scholars have used these and a variety of other pejoratives to describe Qoheleth, the author of the book of Ecclesiastes. But are these monikers fair assessments of this formative book of the Hebrew wisdom tradition? Brian Neil Peterson challenges this dominant scholarly perspective by arguing that Qoheleth’s message is more optimistic than it appears. He insists that Qoheleth—a realist who recognizes that the world is broken due to the Fall in Genesis 3—i