Excerpt from The Biblical Illustrator; Or Anecdotes, Similes, Emblems, Illustrations: Expository, Scientific, Georgraphical, Historical, and Homiletic, Gathered From a Wide Range of Home and Foreign Literature, on the Verses of the Bible

Tm: Canomorrr or me Boom - The collection of sacred writings which was held in reverence by the Jews of Palestine in the days of our Lord and His apostles, consisted of twenty-two books, and these included the Book of Ecclesiastes. The first preachers of Christianity appear to have been in complete agreement with their unconverted brethren as to the authority of their sacred books; and in point of fact, all the books of the Jewish canon have always enjoyed unquestioned authority in the Christian Church. It is no disparagement to the authority of the Book of Ecclesiastes that no direct quotation from it is to be found in the New Testament. A few coincidences of thought or expression have been pointed out (0. G. Eccles. Xi. 5 with John iii. 8; Eccles. Ix. 10 with John ix. But none of them is decisive enough to warrant our asserting with any confidence that the Old Testament passage was present to the mind of the New Testament writer. 'but there is no reason to imagine that any of the apostles would have hesitated to appeal to the authority of any book of the Jewish canon, if his subject had required such a reference. In the Jewish schools there was controversy, about the end of the first century of our era, whether the Book of Ecclesiastes was one of those which defile the hands that is to say, whether it was affected by certain ceremonial ordinances, devised in order to guard the sacred books from irreverent usage. We need not inquire what exact amount of authority might be conceded to the book by those who then placed it on a lower level than the rest; for the view which ultimately prevailed recognized it as entitled to all the prerogatives of canonical Scripture. (g. Salmon, D.D.)

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