Summary
Date: 3rd Century B.C.E.
As literature, Ecclesiastes belongs, along with Proverbs, Job, and some other sections of the Bible, in the category of wisdom. Wisdom texts reflect on the nature of the world and the God who created and controls it, and on the place of humans in this divine creation. These observations are usually presented as the work of one or more sages, who arrive at the observations by exercising wisdom-a faculty based on their own experience and that of other sages before them, and sometimes also on divine revelation. But whether from experience or revelation, the wisdom is regularly understood to have God as its ultimate source.