Obsessing on Ecclesiastes and Wondering Why

I have an enduring fascination with the book of Ecclesiastes. Truth be told, my study of the book has become something of an obsession of late. The text itself would seem to discourage this kind of intensity because it strikingly states that “All is futile” (1.2) [1] and further notes that “much study” is a tiresome business (12.12). However, my drive to understand is as ceaseless as the natural cycles that go on and on and on and on (1.4-8), like a wheel that turns but never reaches its destination! So I offer my reflections, not as settled convictions, but as insights that have surfaced in my obsessive quest to probe the depths of one of the most enigmatic books of Scripture.

Let me offer the following thoughts about authorship before I delve into the message of the text itself. Tradition has it that Ecclesiastes was written by King Solomon. The author is identified as “son of David” and “king in Jerusalem” in 1.1. And in 1.12-2.26 he describes himself as the wealthiest and wisest of all Israel’s kings (this seems somewhat pretentious given that only two kings had reigned in Israel prior to him!). One Rabbi went so far as to suggest that not only was Ecclesiastes written by Solomon, but that it was written by Solomon in his old age when he had become senile! Regardless of where you stand on the senility argument the tradition of Solomonic’ authorship presents difficulties for the interpreter. The text itself does not explicitly name Solomon as the author but instead claims to be written by an individual by the name of “Qohelet.” Qohelet is a feminine noun that means “gatherer” or assembler.” This has led some commentators to think that Qohelet might be the female personification of wisdom itself, like her counterpart in the book of Proverbs that assembles her children for edifying instruction (1.20-33). If Qohelet were really a king it is hard to understand why he is explicitly identified as a “sage” in 12.9. And apart from the “royal testimony” in 1.12-2.26 the author more often writes from the perspective of a royal subject rather than as a powerful monarch (see 5.7-8). The evidence on authorship leads me to be skeptical of the traditional claim that Solomon wrote Ecclesiastes. I favor the view that Qohelet was a male sage that used the literary device known as “royal fiction” to emphasize his point about the brevity and futility of existence. However, the text loses none of its canonical authority in taking this position. Nor does it lose any of its mysterious power to baffle the interpreter!

The message of Ecclesiastes is no less difficult to resolve than the issue of authorship. Its content is problematic regardless of who wrote it. Robert Crenshaw has called it the “Bible’s strangest book” given its “oppressive message” of the total futility of life. [2] What do we make of a Scripture that begins with the assertion “Utter futility! Utter futility! All is futile!” (1.2)? The word translated as futility (hebel) has both a temporal and an existential meaning. It means either brief or futile or both depending on the context. I think that a good starting point is to take these “words of Qohelet” (1.1) as seriously as we take the prophetic “words of Jeremiah” (Jer. 1.1) or the “words of Amos” (Amos 1.1). The words of Qohelet may be dark and perplexing but they are nevertheless “truthful” words (12.10) that command our attention if not our immediate respect.

I would suggest that the word of the Lord came to Qohelet just as certainly as it came to Isaiah, Jeremiah or Ezekiel but the manner in which it came was different. Throughout the book we find phrases like “I set my mind to study” (1.12), “I said to myself” (1.16), “I realized” (3.14), “I mused” (3.17), “I observed” (4.1), “I tested with wisdom” (7.23), and “I have seen” (10.5) repeated over and over again. The focus is explicitly on the thinker and the disciplined mental processes involved in the quest to understand all that goes on under the sun. The heavy use of such “I” language gives one the distinct impression that Qohelet is something of an egotist and rather self-absorbed. No doubt a brilliant egotist as the existence of twenty-six words or combinations of words that appear nowhere else in the Hebrew Scripture testify to a uniquely creative individuality. The writing style is also highly personal and extremely candid. Maybe it is precisely the egotism and self-absorption that can give us a key into the profound experience that is voiced in this troubled and troubling text. The philosopher William Barret has said, “there is no human temperament that does not potentially reveal some truth” and that even “morbidity has it own unique and revelatory power.” [3] It strikes me that Qohelet’s obsessive fascination with the dark side of life and ultimately with death itself is something of an epiphany, an illusion-shattering epiphany. I think it is as true of Qohelet what the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche said of himself, “I am no man. I am dynamite.” [4] The wisdom of the sad sage of Ecclesiastes explodes the illusions by which most people order their lives; the illusions of prosperity, grandiosity and immortality that feed the lust for life and fuel the insatiable desire to acquire and achieve. In contrast to these illusions it reveals that all life and every life exists in the shadow of death, that all questions do not have tidy theological answers, that hard reality does not conform to our hopeful expectations, and that all human existence participates in the frustration of a universe that is constantly in motion on a funeral dirge march toward oblivion (12.3-8). Death casts its long and nihilistic shadow over the entire lifespan, from cradle to coffin. It places a huge question mark over all of our achievements and it frustrates every attempt to penetrate this deepest and darkest of all mysteries. In the game of life there are no 'get out of jail free' cards. And even faith in God does not liberate one from the second law of thermodynamics or obliterate the cold, hard, dark, inevitable facts of human experience.

The wisdom of Ecclesiastes is wisdom from below, arising from experience in contrast to the sometime prophetic claim of direct divine revelation from above. It expresses the truth of the human situation from the ground up. Such wisdom is born in the crucible of deep reflection and careful observation of the world as it is, not the world as we wish it would be or hope it will be. It is a hard wisdom arising out of this world with all of its misery, oppression, and frustration that inevitably ends in death.

Like Job before him, the author of Ecclesiastes doubts that history rewards virtue and punishes vice in the way that the earlier wisdom teachers had so dogmatically insisted that it did. Qohelet observed that “sometimes a good man perishes in spite of his goodness, and sometimes a wicked one endures in spite of his wickedness” (7:15). Unlike Job’s friends, Qohelet refused to accept the traditional maxim that a man’s external circumstances were an accurate reflection of his internal condition. No doubt he would have made a much better companion than those three “miserable comforters.” Because he knew that reality was far more complex than the simple logic of “obey and prosper, disobey and suffer” could calculate. He knew that death was the inevitable “fate” of all and that no amount of virtue could alter that reality in the least.

For Qohelet the best that can be attained in our brief and futile lives is an enjoyment of life’s simple pleasures; eating and drinking, friendship and loving companionship (4.9-12; 5.17; 9.9). This makes me think of the philosophy of one of the ant characters (voiced by Woody Allen) in the movie Antz when he says, “It's my lot in life. It’s not a lot but it’s my life!” It may not be a lot, but a small island of simple comfort in an ocean of endless misery, is probably the difference between total despair and tolerable melancholy, between ending-it-all and toughing-it-out. Beyond this such simple pleasures also serve as a contact point with God because they come as gifts of God and not as rewards for our works (2.24). Since life is a brief book between the bookends of non-existence then surely the simple God-given joys of our physical existence are to be fully embraced.

Ultimately, for the quixotic sage Qohelet, God as well as life, is a great mystery. In what is perhaps the most ironic and certainly one of the most courageous confession’s in Scripture the humbled intellectual states, “All this I tested with wisdom. I thought I could fathom it, but it eludes me” (7.23). Unfortunately, there is no simple mathematical formula by which life and the mysterious workings of God can be calculated. The logic of human existence and divine sovereignty, if there is any, is deep and elusive. The shadow of death extends even into the fair country of biblical wisdom itself. The proud claim to know-it-all, to have found the final truth, to have arrived at the end of the equation is perhaps the greatest illusion of all. It is this illusion that, above all, is the primary obstacle to true knowledge because it attempts to fit the infinite mystery of life and God into a puzzle that can be pieced together by the finite human mind. In contrast to this the surly sage insists that life can be enjoyed as a gift but it cannot be solved as a riddle.

It is rather curious that a book like Ecclesiastes could become part of the canon of Scripture. It not only disclosed new meaning but it also exploded some of the most cherished traditions of Israel. But on reflection its conclusion in the canon of Scripture seems quite appropriate. Theological claims to finality and completeness have been the one constant in the everchanging landscape of biblical interpretation. Qohelet is a dissonant voice in that choir of absolute certainty. He raises his voice, in part, to remind us that all our thinking, even our best theological thinking, is always on the way and never at the end. For as Walter Brueggemann says of the task of biblical interpretation,
"The only way to turn the book into a fixed idol is to imagine that the final interpretation has been given, an act of imagination that is a deep act of disobedience to the lively God who indwells the text". [5]

If I were to add my own editorial comment to the text of Ecclesiastes, like we find in the scribal addition in 12.9-14, it would go something like this. “There is a time for everything, even the melancholy reflections that inevitably arise out of the futility and frustration of human existence. Such are not the only words or the last words, and maybe not even the best words, but they are nevertheless utterly true and significant words. These searchingly honest and painful words are an invaluable aid in the agonizing quest to understand the meaning of our all-too-brief lives!”

[1] All translations are taken from the Tanakh, Jewish Publication Society, 1985.

[2] Robert Crenshaw, Ecclesiastes (Westminster: Philadelphia, 1987); 23.

[3] William Barrett, Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (New York: Doubleday, 1958); 10.

[4] Walter Kaufmann, Basic Writings of Nietzsche (New York: Random House, 1995); 782.

[5] Walter Brueggemann, An Introduction to the Old Testament (Louisville: Westminster, 2003): 13.