Ecclesiastes 7:28 - On the nouns אָדָם and אִשָּׁה

(The above rendering comes from the RJPS translation—an adaptation of the NJPS translation. On the RJPS translation team, the member who had primary responsibility for our construal of the noun אָדָם was Dr. Job Jindo, while I had the main responsibility for the construal of the noun אִשָּׁה.)

As I discussed at verse 26, this passage (vv. 26–29) contains grammatical oddities and is highly ambiguous, for its relationship to its co-text is unclear. In support of that view are the following points, excerpted from Doug Ingram, “‘Riddled with Ambiguity’: Ecclesiastes 7:23–8:1 as an Example,” in The Words of the Wise Are like Goads: Engaging Qohelet in the 21st Century, edited by Mark J. Boda, Tremper Longman III, and Cristian G. Rata (Eisenbrauns, 2013), 219–240; here 220, 233–234.

• Part of the way that Ecclesiastes facilitates learning is by using the tool of ambiguity.… The purpose of the ambiguity in Ecclesiastes is to encourage readers to think for themselves as they seek to work out what the text means.
• Scholars are divided over the meaning of אָדָם here. Should it be rendered “person,” conveying the sense that it has every other time it is used in Ecclesiastes (some 48x), or should it be translated “man,” in opposition to אִשָּׁה (“woman”) in the next part of the verse? The issue is probably not so much the interpretation as it is the uncertainty regarding gender.
• The text does not clarify for whom (man or woman) Qohelet* is looking. In fact, a very significant gap is left here for readers to fill.

Even so, there are grounds for asserting that one construal is more probable than others. In general, for resolving ambiguities in language, the human mind relies first and foremost upon what is conventional—both cultural tropes and the meanings of words and expressions. If we consider that the three key words here are אָדָם ,אִשָּׁה, and the verb מָצָא (“found”), then arguably they together evoke three conventions as background for the plain sense of this passage—and therefore they illuminate what/who Koheleth had so much trouble finding:

• in the famous episode in Gen 2:18–23, the Deity has great difficulty in finding (מָצָא, v. 19) an עֵזֶר כְּנֶגְדּוֹ “fitting counterpart” for הָאָדָם “the Human,” who ultimately turns out to be אִשָּׁה “Woman,” which becomes the etiological basis for marriage (v. 24);
• the verb מָצָא is elsewhere collocated with אִשָּׁה only in regard to finding a wife (Prov 18:22 and 31:10); and
• in the biblical view, couples do not find their perfect mates easily, but only through divine providence (e.g., Genesis 24 and Prov 19:14; 31:10).

In light of those conventions, in this context אִשָּׁה would readily designate a type: a prospective female marriage partner. Indeed, that was the view of Arnold Ehrlich, Randglossen zur Hebräischen Bibel (1914) 7:86, ad loc.:

Danach ergibt sich für das Ganze der Sinn wie folgt:

ein Weib [für die Ehe] suche ich mir immer noch und finde nicht.

The meaning of the entire matter becomes this:

I am still looking for a woman to marry and cannot find one.

This construal finds further support from its being the most consistent also with the tenor of both of the other two instances of הָאִשָּׁה in the book: two verses earlier and 9:9, “Enjoy happiness with a woman (הָאִשָּׁה) you love all the fleeting days of life that have been granted to you….”

To sum up thus far, the revised translation construes אִשָּׁה as labeling a prospective wife. On this view, as Job Jindo pointed out to me, the utterance first and foremost “is a statement about how difficult it is to find the love of one’s life.” This would be a prototypical usage of this noun, profiling its referent as a defining participant in the situation under discussion.**

Now, in his JPS Bible Commentary volume on this book, Michael Fox notes that most plain-sense commentators (e.g., Joseph Kara) read the bare noun אָדָם as being employed to refer to a specific subset of humankind: an exemplary member of the species. At the same time, as Ingram likewise states, some interpreters believe that women are not in view. Yet if it is a prospective wife that Koheleth is discussing, then the passage becomes more coherent and informative if the scope of denotation of אָדָם is not construed as restricted to males.

Indeed, as noted by Ingram, a nongendered construal of אָדָם would be conventional in this book, and therefore it would have been the default. Furthermore, in the Bible more broadly, this noun’s denotative scope is never otherwise restricted by gender (except with regard to one specific individual, namely the progenitor of the human species; see my comment at Gen 2:7). Therefore a gender restriction would not be expected here. As Luzzatto noted ad loc. (and similarly Ehrlich):

והסתכל כי אדם כולל זכר ונקבה, ובכל המקרא כתוב איש ואשה, לא אדם ואשה.

Notice that [the scope of] ’adam includes male and female; and throughout the Bible it is ’ish and ’ishah that are counterposed, not ’adam and ’ishah.

Nonetheless, as RJPS has footnoted in the next verse, the force of the last part of this verse remains uncertain—due to the passage’s grammatical oddities and striking ambiguities.

For Jindo, this verse “has little to do with misogyny (i.e., it is not an indictment of women in general),” but I am not convinced. As Ehrlich noted, jeder Pessimist ist mehr oder weniger ein Weiberfeind “every [male] pessimist is more or less a misogynist.” In any case, our assessment of how Koheleth’s expression of despair reflects on his (perfectionist?) character need not affect the rendering of this passage.

The NJPS rendering “I found only one human being in a thousand, and the one I found among so many was never a woman” was modified in the present translation, due to two flaws. First, “one human being in a thousand” seemed too obscure for an idiomatic translation. Second, “was never a woman” discouraged readers’ construing the probable topic of a prospective wife. In both respects, the revised rendering provides warranted clarifications—while employing square brackets to show that the translators have made inferences about implicit meanings.

*On the name Qohelet/Koheleth, see 1:1 and the NJPS/RJPS footnote there.

**On a situation-oriented construal of אִשָּׁה, the feminine form of the situating noun אִישׁ, see this introduction, pp. 11–16.