Front Matter -- Copyright page -- Dedication -- Acknowledgments -- Abbreviations -- The Contradictions in Ecclesiastes and Nonmonologic Unity -- Modernist Approaches to Ecclesiastes and Beyond -- Bakhtinian Hermeneutics and Ecclesiastes -- The Historical Scope of Qohelet’s Dialogic Utterances -- A Larger Discursive Background of Qohelet’s Utterances -- The Voices in the Formation of Qohelet’s Consciousness -- Qohelet’s Dialogized Interior Monologue on Wisdom -- Closing Without Finalizing -- Back Matter -- Bibliography -- Index of Ancient Sources -- Index of Modern Authors.

Ecclesiastes, also known as Qohelet, is a fascinating text filled with intriguing contradictions, such as wisdom’s beneficial consequences, God’s justice, and wisdom’s superiority over pleasure. Under the paradigm of modernism, the contradictions in the book have been regarded as problems to be harmonized or explained away. In Reanimating Qohelet’s Contradictory Voices , Jimyung Kim, drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s insights, offers an alternative reading that embraces the contradictions as they stand. For Kim, Qohelet’s or the protagonist’s contradictory consciousness is dialogically constructed by his contact with a complex web of discourses. Instead of harmonizing them or explaining them away, Kim identifies various dialogic voices available to Qohelet and demonstrates how those voices constitute Qohelet’s contradictory utterances and construct his unfinalizable identity.