What are we to learn from this Book? Are we to refuse to read it and to reverse the judgment that included it in the Canon? Hardly that. It is well that man's doubts should find a place in the same sacred collection with his surest beliefs, for doubt may be but a stage in a process from an inadequate to a fuller faith. The book shows that the common appreciation of Israel's faith could not satisfy the mind that had its attention fixed upon the facts of life; and especially does it show that the hope of immortality, apart from which Israel's faith had largely developed, is not the one thing that is lacking. That hope, with its promise of retribution in a future and better world, will always appear too speculative to some minds to relieve the burdens of the life that now is, and even if believed in, it would offer no real clue to the meaning of our trials here, but only tend to take men's eyes off this life where perchance they might find the solution they have missed. For there is an attitude to life that solves its darkest problems, a disposition which transmutes its pain and failure, finding it no enigma, but an opportunity for learning the will of the Father; our presence here not a thing to be reluctantly borne, but a task to be joyfully accepted as the commission of God. The book of Ecclesiastes shows us, therefore, that the revelation through Israel is not yet complete; for it voices the unsatisfied need and stretches out hands of faith for something not yet made known. It is the deep dark of the night; the next hour will see the Morning Star of Bethlehem above the horizon, the fleeing shadows and the breaking of the day.
The prevalence of the expectation of a personal Messiah reflected in the Gospels, and the clearness and consistency of the idea, are not to be explained solely from the Old Testament prophecies.
In the Apocrypha the Messianic expectation has almost died out (Ecclus. xlix. 11; 1 Macc. ii. 57), but after the Maccabæan revolt it revived, owing doubtless to the disappointment caused by the deterioration of the Hasmonæan dynasty, of which so much had been expected. The Pharisees, who resented the policy of the Hasmonæans, made the idea of a restoration of the Davidic line the peculiar property of their party, and from this time until the appearance of Jesus, Messianic expectation reached a point never before attained. The following summary shows the emergence of the idea in the literature of the period:--