ECCLESIASTES 7:27-29

 Q: How do you explain that this biblical passage is so highly unflattering to women in general?

This is one of three OT passages Wenham (Toward Old Testament Ethics, p. 287) has identified as being possibly denigrating toward women. It reads: “This is what I found, says the Teacher...adding one thing to another to find the sum, which my mind has sought repeatedly, but I have not found. One man among a thousand I found, but a woman among all these I have not found. See, this alone I found, that God made human beings straightforward, but they have devised many schemes.” (NRSV) (I like a paraphrase of the last part of this passage that I heard somewhere: “We are no better than God made us, and some of us are a great deal worse.”) This is a notoriously hard verse to understand, especially concerning what exactly the Teacher's search was for. The NRSV Study Bible says that it was wisdom whereas many translations add the word “upright” or “respectable” before “man” and “woman” even though it is not in the Hebrew text. Here are some comments from scholars regarding this passage:

Tremper Longman (The Book of Ecclesiastes): “For those concerned that a biblical book appears to support the views of a misogynist, it must also be remembered that the views of Qohelet are not the teachings of the book of Ecclesiastes any more than the speeches of the three friends constitute the normative teachings of the book of Job...His comments are full of tensions, and thus I have characterized him as a confused wise man whose voice is not to be identified with the teachings of the canonical book.”

C.-L. Seow (Ecclesiastes) marshals linguistic evidence supporting the idea that the last half of v. 28 was an intrusion by another author, or may have been a case of Qoheleth quoting a traditional saying. Or it may simply be a poetic way of stating that he has found virtually no one who corresponds to what he has been looking for, whatever that may happen to be.

Gordis (in Reflecting with Solomon, p. 298) puts it into perspective when he says, “he finds men only one-tenth of one percent better than women!”

Goldberg (Reflecting, p. 318) asks, “Where was the Teacher looking? If he was searching among his harem..., it is doubtful that he would find a woman as she ought to be among the pagan women who had turned his heart from God.”