Ecclesiastes' canonical status was genuinely contested among early rabbis, whose recorded debates, preserved in later rabbinic literature, weighed its apparently contradictory statements, at points seeming to endorse pleasure and at other points to condemn it, and its overall skeptical tone against its traditional attribution to Solomon and its closing exhortation to fear God, which ultimately carried the argument for inclusion. That same traditional attribution is precisely what most modern scholars find hardest to sustain: the book's Hebrew shows features characteristic of a much later stage of the language than Solomon's era, including grammatical constructions and probable loanwords from Persian, evidence widely treated as some of the clearest linguistic dating evidence available for any Hebrew Bible book, pointing to composition centuries after Solomon by a later author writing in his voice, a common and accepted literary convention in the ancient world rather than a deception.
The book's unusually candid uncertainty about an afterlife, "who knows whether the human spirit goes upward," and its refusal to promise clear reward for righteousness, have made it a recurring touchstone for later readers, religious and secular alike, wrestling honestly with mortality and meaning, cited as often in modern literature and philosophy as in devotional writing.