Your literal-minded reading of Ecclesiastes brings to mind those who are at pains to explain that the Song of Songs, also attributed to Solomon, really isn't the sensual love song it is but some kind of platonic allegory about divine love, as if God's love could have nothing in common with the human kind. Are we not made in His image?

Is this a profanation - to read the Bible as literature, even to criticize it as such? I would submit that reading the Word with a critical eye is not to denigrate it but to appreciate, and apprehend it, in a different, literary light. Granted, the Bible is more than literature, but that doesn't mean it isn't literature, too.

It's sad, the extent of biblical illiteracy in a nation rooted in the values of Pilgrims and Puritans - and in which the religious impulse continues to play so great a part, whether we're talking about Martin Luther King Jr. or the sudden emergence of a Baptist preacher like Mike Huckabee in the presidential sweepstakes.

Surely a literal-minded pedantry can only discourage people from appreciating the Bible as the literary masterpiece it is. Presenting the Bible as just another moralistic tract, rather than in all its literary and poetic glory, only disguises its greatness. It would be like reading Shakespeare for the plots and not the inexhaustible language. How perverse.

What rich and enduring literature this Book is - always human even as it is divine, ever relevant even as it is timeless, as majestic and moving in the English of the King James Version as it is by turns tender and thunderous in Hebrew.

It's long been my fancy that the Five Books of Moses were handed down at Sinai in Elizabethan-Jacobean English, and only then translated into ancient Hebrew. I agree with Robert Alter, whose literary approach to Biblical narrative has made him the leading biblical translator of our time: While the authors of the KJV may have been deficient in Hebrew, translations ever since have been deficient in English. The treasure of the English tongue has seldom if ever been so wondrously displayed. How not wonder at such, yes, literature?

There. I feel better now. This has been great therapy.

Bless your heart,

Inky Wretch