Four Strange Books of the Bible: Jonah, Daniel, Koheleth, Esther

The author is interested in the books of the Bible which were written in the age of Greek intellectual dominance. In the present work he tries to understand Jonah, Daniel, Koheleth [Ecclesiastes], and Esther as witnesses to the mentality of men of that period in the ancient Near East." To refer the books of the Bible to the conditions of their origin is a more complicated and in a sense a more dangerous task than to do the same thing for, say, Homer, because the biblical books have for over two thousand years been the subject of deeply committed interpretation by Jewish and Christian religious thinkers of varying views. It is one of the merits of Dr. Bickerman's book that he pays attention to these later interpretations, not only to dismiss them or to be witty at their expense (though he sometimes does both these things), but also to illuminate changes of viewpoint and to show how different historical circumstances produce different ways of reading.