Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This article considers the Book of Qohelet in terms of its concerns and stylistics and with an eye towards the book's modern analogues. In particular, I look at the themes of toil and progress, time and memory, justice, and wisdom and knowledge while endeavouring to maintain the contradictory and self-negating dynamics of the text. Qohelet, I conclude, finds no ultimate good and no foundational principle in the universe. The declaration that all is judgement about the human experience of existence. Ours is not a world that admits human reason or responds to our longing for meaning-it is an absurd existence. Various stylistic strategies are employed in the text to support and sustain this message and these techniques combine to form a poetics of absurdity. The book is cast in an autobiographical voice, plays with the dynamics of aphorism and tautology, and, most significantly, builds itself around the poetics of contradiction. The text is engaged in a continual process of erasure whereby statements are made, explored, and then negated. I conclude by considering two modern analogues to the book of Qohelet, Albert Camus and Lev Shestov. These two thinkers parallel the book of Qohelet in both concern and style. They too find that the universe is infused with contradictions and does not bend to our longing for order and reason. Ultimately, all three sources convey a similar understanding of the human existential condition.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".