The speaker of Ecclesiastes, and not quite a person. Qohelet is a participle from qahal, 'to assemble' — so 'the one who convenes an assembly,' the Congregator — and it is used of nobody else in the Bible. It is grammatically FEMININE while taking masculine verbs, which nobody has satisfactorily explained; the likeliest account is that it began as a title of office and hardened into a name. The Greek translators made it Ekklēsiastēs, from ekklēsia — the word this translation renders 'congregation' — which is where the English title of the book comes from. ⚠ He introduces himself as 'son of David, king in Jerusalem' (1:1) and then says 'I WAS king' (1:12), a past tense that does not fit SOLOMON, who never stopped being one. The rabbis answered the difficulty with a legend: that Solomon was deposed by the demon Ashmedai and wandered saying 'I was king' (Talmud, Gittin 68b). The simpler reading is that a later writer adopted a Solomonic persona in order to run an experiment only a king could afford — and dropped the mask after chapter 2, never using it again.