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Qoheleth critiques the teachings found in the rest of the Hebrew Bible, but why did he push back against his inherited traditions? Raising the possibility that Qoheleth’s dissonant and defiant tone arose from a life lived in exile, Brian Fiu Kolia, a second-generation, Australian-born Samoan, invites readers to engage Qoheleth’s skepticism from the perspective of Kolia’s own Samoan diasporic community, where skepticism toward their own house (maota) of traditions and religious practices results from the clash of old and new. In today’s largely transnational world, the implications of this (re)reading are significant for understanding how the establishment of diaspora communities generates tension between worlds.

Brian Fiu Kolia is a lecturer in Hebrew Bible/Old Testament at Malua Theological College in Samoa and an ordained minister of the Congregational Christian Church Samoa. His most recent publication is Unsettling Theologies: Memory, Identity, and Place (2024), coedited with Michael Mawson.

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