The Predestinate: Ecclesiastes and the Man Who Outshone the Sun King

by Christopher R. Seitz

Overview

This is an unusual book, rich with intrigue. It is, foremost, a book about Ecclesiastes—not a commentary, not another scholarly monograph, but rather a guide to understanding the angle of vision the ancient text asks us to see: that is, how to live our lives within proper limits, how to surrender ourselves to God, and finally how to learn to die.

With creativity, flair, insight, and eloquence, Christopher Seitz moves effortlessly between the wisdom of Kohelet and an illustrious figure of the seventeenth century not well known outside of France—Nicolas Fouquet, whose position as Superintendent of Finances under Louis XIV gave him wealth, fame, creative talent, friends, and influence. He was the purported author of a highly successful volume of sayings from Solomon entitled Les Conseils de la Sagesse, and the rapidity and severity of his fall is the stuff of legend. This biographical angle gives to the treatment of Ecclesiastes a fresh perspective for those who are confounded by this challenging book. Seitz guides us in evaluating how we are to view the narrator in relation to Solomon (whose name is never mentioned) by centering on the matter of authorial perspective.

Fouquet’s life mirrors Solomon’s as that legendary king has been given voice in the book of Ecclesiastes. And as with Ecclesiastes, the contested issue of Fouquet’s authorship of the book associated with him relativizes authorship as a determinative category for interpretation, which has presented a major challenge for scholarship on the biblical book. He and the Solomon referred to, taken as a source of wise counsel, endure similar circumstances and share a landscape of penitential confession and surrender to God’s purposes. Their common thread is scriptural and "Solomonic." And the thing they most truly share, and which Ecclesiastes seeks to show us—as Les Conseils does in its way—are two larger-than-life individuals, broken and penitent and, just to the degree that is so, finally coming to their spiritual senses.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781481324465
Publisher:	Baylor University Press
Publication date:	09/15/2025
Pages:	144
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

Christopher R. Seitz is an American Old Testament scholar and theologian known for his work in biblical interpretation and theological hermeneutics. He is the senior research professor of biblical interpretation at Wycliffe College, Toronto School of Theology.. He is also an ordained priest in the Episcopal Church, and served as canon theologian in the Episcopal Diocese of Dallas (2008-2015). Seitz is the author of numerous books, including Isaiah 1-39 in the Interpretation series (WJK, 1993), The Elder Testament (Baylor University Press, 2018), Convergences (Baylor University Press, 2020), and The Heights of the Hills Are His Also (Baylor University Press, 2024).

Table of Contents

Introduction
1 The Predestinate
2 The Preacher Says Goodbye: The Voice from the End of Life
3 The Superintendent Says Goodbye: The Voice from Exile
4 Koheleth’s Solomonic Meditation
5 Quo non Descendet?
6 Whither Wisdom?
7 Authorship, Inspiration, Reception: Hermeneutical Observations
8 Koheleth and Fouquet: The End of the Matter
Conclusion
Appendix 1 Authorship in the Seventeenth Century
Appendix 2 Arrival at Pignerol Prison: Snapshot of the First Ten Years
Appendix 3 Notes on the Fouquet Family

What People are Saying About This

Claire Mathews McGinnis

In this innovative and eminently readable book, Seitz illuminates how approaching Ecclesiastes (Koheleth) by means of its "Solomonic authorial frame" (not Solomon as its actual author), shapes one’s reading of the whole and its parts. A strikingly similar literary and historical example from seventeenth-century France illuminates and lends weight to the argument, which also engages scholarly discussion about canonical ordering, the history of interpretation and the category of so-called "Wisdom Literature." Along the way Seitz is at turns erudite, engaging, witty, and profound. Those interested in Ecclesiastes, in canonical and theological interpretation, reception history (and French literature and history) will find this book rewarding.

Charles Drazin

A catastrophic reversal of fortune meant that Nicolas Fouquet, who had once outshone even the Sun King in the magnificence of his achievements, spent the last two decades of his life imprisoned in the Alpine fortress of Pignerol. Christopher Seitz’s book The Predestinate: Ecclesiastes and the Man Who Outshone the Sun King offers a thought-provoking and poignant account of the fate and circumstances that made Nicolas the ideal person to understand and comment on the book of Ecclesiastes. It is a moving, memorable reflection on the nature of wisdom and how a man found redemption in the most extraordinary adversity.

Mark Eliot

This book moves back and forward between two intriguing figures, the Solomon-like narrator of Ecclesiastes and an early modern French courtier (N. Fouquet), who possibly knew too much to stay at court: thus a Qoheleth-Fouquet shuttle. One by one the correspondences (coincidentally and correspondingly the title of the author’ last-but-one-book) are set out. Light is shed on one mystery (the identity of the Preacher) by another (the mysterious if not quite so wonderful counsellor) in what is more than mere jeu d’esprit. These resemblances (disgrace in one’s last years, uncertainty of authorship of the work attributed to each, each a ‘predestinate’ whose being chosen not of their own choosing, a philosophical resilience, inter alia) are uncanny, and help make this a magical and mysterious book, a romance written with verve and elan in effortless prose.

Mark W. Elliott

This book moves backward and forward between two intriguing figures, the Solomon-like narrator of Ecclesiastes and an early modern French courtier Nicolas Fouquet, who possibly knew too much to stay at court: thus a Qoheleth-Fouquet shuttle. One by one the correspondences (coincidentally and correspondingly the title of one of the author’s previous books) are set out. Light is shed on one mystery (the identity of the Preacher) by another (the mysterious if not quite so wonderful counsellor) in what is more than mere jeu d’esprit. These resemblances (disgrace in one’s last years, uncertainty of authorship of the work attributed to each, each a ‘predestinate’ chosen by others, a philosophical resilience, inter alia) are uncanny, and help make this a magical and mysterious book, a romance written with verve and élan in effortless prose.