When Elias Bickerman wrote a little volume called Four Strange Books of the Bible, Ecclesiastes was an easy choice for inclusion. As he remarks, "Ecclesiastes has no known antecedents or spiritual posterity in Jewish thought."¹ This is an exaggeration,² but even Qohelet's successors, the Jewish sages of the rabbinic period, found Ecclesiastes questionably biblical. Thus in Leviticus Rabbah 28:1, R. Benjamin B. Levi remarks, "They sought to suppress Ecclesiastes, for they found in it matters that tend toward the heretical."³ The purpose of this article is to highlight what I think is a particularly significant facet of Ecclesiastes' distinctive, and at first glance heretical, stance vis-á-vis the rest of biblical literature. This is Qohelet's emphasis on the imagery of turning.