The why and how of Blogging Kohelet

This blog will record my efforts to understand the Biblical book of Kohelet, or Ecclesiastes. I have long loved this book as a deeply inspiring and optimistic one (despite the common perception). It seems to me that Kohelet deals with the biggest of questions regarding how to view and to live life, and does so without resorting to prepackaged pieties or simple answers. The author has an unjaundiced view of life, and yet (I believe) a deeply positive one, and a message that can resonate for believers as well as non-believers as well, as he doesn't rely on metaphysics, theology, or revelation at all.

My goal is to dig deeply to understand the book and elucidate for myself its message, whether in the end of inspiration, or as the popular view has it, of despair. I hope too that this exploration will be of interest to others, and that you will read and also comment, helping me in this work.

Methodology

To honestly approach the understanding and appraisal of such a work seriously, I want to set out in advance my methodological assumptions. Starting from different assumptions can lead to very different understandings of the text. Of course, these assumptions must be tested against the text itself, and I will do my best to seek evidence that will test them fairly (and abandon them if necessary).

1. Kohelet is a work of philosophy, by which I mean it seeks to understand and explain aspects of the world by means of rational demonstration and reference to universal beliefs or experiences, rather than by either metaphysical revelation, ancient authority, or experimental data. 
2. Kohelet is a unified work, meant to be read as a whole. Even if it was composed out of pre-existing fragments, I will not be reading it as a pastiche, and will assume that the relationships of each part to every other part, and the whole, of the work are significant. I will seek the overall theme, meaning, and conclusion of the book as a whole, assuming the work to be internally consistent.
3. Kohelet is wisdom literature, in that much of its style and method of communicating is through metaphor, parable, and other indirect methods. In this, it resembles Proverbs, though unlike most of that book Kohelet has longer coherent sections with narrative arcs, and has an overall coherent (if obscure) structure. As wisdom literature, the book needs to be deciphered to be read.
4. Kohelet is built out of sections, which are coherent and thematically or narratively structured, arranged in a larger overall thematic order. The borders between these sections are not always clear, however. The conventional division into chapters is late and not at all dispositive, so I will mostly ignore it.
5. Kohelet uses many terms of art - many words and phrases are used in the book in idiosyncratic, almost technical ways. One of my goals will be to identify these words and determine what they mean in the context of the book. Understanding these terms, I think, is one of the keys to deciphering the meaning of the book.

Given these assumptions, my method will be to first identify many of the key terms and get a first approximation as to what each means, by examining how it is used in the book. Then I will go through the entire book to divide it into thematically and narratively coherent sections. Once such sections are (tentatively) determined, I will go back from the beginning and work out what each sections seems to say, then work to link the sections together to find the overall sweep of the work, and seek its overall message.

Wish me luck!