Abstract

MASENYA, Madipoane  and  RAMANTSWANA, Hulisani. Anything new under the sun of South African Old Testament scholarship? African Qoheleths' review of OTE 1994-2010. Old testam. essays [online]. 2012, vol.25, n.3, pp.598-637. ISSN 2312-3621.

Prior argues that the book of Ecclesiastes "... presumes such a lively and competitive economic environment, full of risk, a somewhat arbitrary, rapidly changing world, where the new-rich of today could easily become the new-poor of tomorrow. "^l Indeed, the world portrayed by the book of Ecclesiastes, can be described as the world in flux, solid yet fragile, conscious of the plight of the poor yet detached, elite yet insufficient, pessimistic yet not without hope, politically aware yet resistant. Such contradictions are embedded in the work whose author/editors set(s) great store by the notion of "vanity of vanities. "In the African Qoheleths ' view, life is characterised by a chasing after the wind. Innovation and change seem to be resisted as "...there is nothing new under the sun"(Eccl 1:9b). In this article, the expression, "the nothingness of anything new under the sun" is used as a hermeneutical lens to cast a contextual glance at the history of (some)research carried out by South African(SA)OT scholars over the past eighteen years. To limit the scope of the article, the Qoheleths focus on the research articles published in the prestigious scholarly journal Old Testament Essays (OTE) during the period 1994-2010.

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