Witnessing the text: a critical empathetic approach to Ecclesiastes with affect, trauma and bystander perspectives

This thesis explores the significance and effectiveness of a three-pronged reading strategy that is aimed at facilitating critical empathy and focuses particularly on the biblical wisdom book of Ecclesiastes. The three components of this strategy draw on affect studies, trauma studies, and the bystander approach, with the latter adapted from Holocaust studies. Following examination of biblical Hebrew affect vocabulary as a means to better understand the emotional force and multiple impacts of the phenomenon of trauma, the bystander approach extends analysis of the trauma response beyond its usual focus on the direct victim to consider bystanders of traumatic situations or events. This method focuses both on Qoheleth, the narrator of Ecclesiastes, as a bystander and on the reader of Ecclesiastes as a participatory and affected reader. As such, this research examines how readers’ experiences and emotional engagements with the text can illuminate and deepen biblical interpretation. The study also argues that the three approaches foster critical empathy—that is, the co-emphasis on emotional engagement alongside intellectual analysis. This, in turn, it is proposed, brings relevance, meaning, and transformation to both text and reader. Critical empathy is relatively new in terms of its explicit inclusion in biblical criticism. Also innovative is the application of the bystander approach to the book of Ecclesiastes. The thesis, therefore, contributes in original ways to a deepened encounter with the ancient book of Ecclesiastes; the proposed reading method also offers opportunities beyond this text.