ABSTRACT
Words cannot be evaluated without a consideration of the social ownership of language and literature. Culture is a term with many possible meanings, but these are always connected with the social world of human activity. To speak of cultural exegesis is to suggest that a given text has its place within the cultural boundaries of human social groups and that one mode of finding meaning in text is to explore the ways in which readers in different times and places have interpreted it. For the book of Ecclesiastes this means considering its place in Christian and Jewish canons of sacred texts and how its being placed before readers as a carrier of religious meaning has led them to explore its possible message for their own time and place. Ideology and historicism deal with the material context of words as communication tools for human beings who live within a social world.
