Introduction to Ecclesiastes

IT IS BEST TO BE FRANK from the outset: Ecclesiastes is a difficult book. It is written in a form of Hebrew different from much of the remainder of the Old Testament, and it regularly challenges the reader of the original as to grammar and syntax. The interpretation even of words that occur frequently in the book is often unclear and a matter of dispute, partly because there is frequent wordplay in the course of the argument. The argument is itself complex and sometimes puzzling and has often provoked the charge of inconsistency or outright self-contradiction.

When considered in the larger context of the Old Testament, Ecclesiastes stands out as an unusual book whose connection with the main stream of biblical tradition seems tenuous. There is nothing here of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; of the Exodus; of God’s special dealings with Israel in the Promised Land; or of prophetic hope in a great future. Instead we find ourselves apparently reading about the meaninglessness of life and the certainty of death, in a universe in which God is certainly present, but is distant and somewhat uninvolved. When considered in the context of the New Testament, the dissonance between Ecclesiastes and its scriptural context seems even greater, for if there is one thing that we do not find in this book, it is the joy of resurrection. Perhaps this is one reason why Ecclesiastes is seldom read or preached in modern churches.

The discomfort of the community of biblical faith with Ecclesiastes is not, however, a new phenomenon. From the very beginning it is evident that the nature of the book itself as authoritative Scripture was doubted by significant numbers of Jews. Two famous passages in the Mishnah,1 echoed in the Talmud and in later Jewish writings, refer to disputes among the rabbis on precisely this point—whether or not Ecclesiastes “defiles the hands.” They make clear that this issue divided the famous rabbinic schools of Hillel (which thought it did defile the hands) and Shammai (which thought it did not).

One of the main grounds of rabbinic difficulty clearly lay in the contradictions perceived in the book, which were felt to be unusually difficult to harmonize (e.g., 2:2 and 8:15, respectively questioning and commending Heb. śimḥa, “pleasure, joy”; 7:3 and 9, respectively commending and criticizing Heb. kaʿas, “anger, frustration”).2 This led to ongoing attempts throughout the succeeding centuries to offer readings of the book that satisfactorily and coherently accounted for all of its content.

Another concern was its perceived hedonistic tone, found in the frequent advice to “eat and drink and find satisfaction” (e.g., 2:24; 3:13); connected with this is an alleged heretical tendency, insofar as the book questions, for example, whether there is any real profit to be made from life God has created (e.g., 1:3), and claims that there is nothing better than a life of eating, drinking, and enjoyment (e.g., 2:24; 8:15). The author particularly commends a licentious way of life to the young (11:9).3 Our earliest commentaries on Ecclesiastes, whether Jewish or Christian, indicate just how uncomfortable such sentiments made many religious readers of the book feel, for they often avoided interpreting the text according to its plain sense when dealing with such troublesome passages, attempting to make it more “spiritual” than it otherwise appeared to them.

We are dealing here, then, with an unsettling book. Ecclesiastes has a long history of perturbation behind it. What is to be done with it? We might organize a campaign to remove it from the canon of Scripture, perhaps; but such a campaign would be unlikely to succeed, given the long-standing acceptance of the book by the church universal, and we ourselves with our new, slightly slimmer canon would stand in questionable relationship to this larger church. We should also require to ask ourselves questions about our view of its Founder and his first apostles, all of whom regarded the Old Testament Scriptures as foundational to Christian faith and life, and none of whom ever intended their sayings and writings to be understood outside the context of the Old Testament Scriptures.

A more popular alternative, adopted by many modern Christians, is to continue to accept Ecclesiastes in principle as part of the canon but to ignore it in practice. Whole areas of the modern church, indeed, seem to have adopted this strategy in respect of almost the entire Old Testament, in the mistaken belief that there exists something called “New Testament Christianity.” To claim that Scriptures are authoritative, however, while in reality ignoring them, is to provoke serious questions about one’s integrity.

A third possible response to our problematic book might be to find ways of reinterpreting what it has to say—perhaps by resorting to the kind of allegorical, spiritualizing approach to biblical interpretation that was so popular among ancient and medieval Christian commentators. As the long history of biblical interpretation has itself shown, however, this approach makes it simply too easy to force the text to say what one wishes it to say and thus simply to subvert its authority in a different way. Such an interpretative method may increase the reader’s comfort level, but it can do great violence to the text.

When, for example, Jerome interprets Ecclesiastes as a treatise aiming “to show the utter vanity of every [my italics] sublunary enjoyment, and hence the necessity of betaking one’s self to an ascetic life [my italics] devoted entirely to the service of God,”4 it seems obvious to us (although presumably not to Jerome) that the text is not in control of Jerome, but Jerome of the text. His method of reading enabled him too easily to shape the text in his own image and disabled him from hearing anything in it that might challenge his own assumptions and beliefs.

What is to be done, instead, with Ecclesiastes? It is to be struggled with as an intrinsic part of the Scriptures. It is to be wrestled with in terms of its original meaning, with all its unusual grammar and syntax and with all its clever wordplays, as we seek to understand its parts in terms of the whole and to come to some understanding of its “contradictions” and “heresies” and “licentiousness.” It is to be grappled with in its connectedness (or not) with the remainder of the Old Testament and in its advocacy of a joy that is not yet a fully biblical resurrection joy. This struggle with the text is to be engaged in with determination (which will be necessary), but not with fear or trepidation, for whatever the truth is that Ecclesiastes has to tell us in the context of biblical truth overall, Christian readers know that it will be truth that sets us free (John 8:32). Cherished beliefs that are found not to be true, by contrast, when examined by the searchlight of biblical truth, are not worth retaining and can do us no good if we insist on doing so.

Above all, then, Ecclesiastes is to be encountered with openness—openness to God and openness to change. For we must always consider the possibility, when we encounter a difficult biblical book, that the problem lies not with the book but with ourselves. The “difficulty” may be that the book speaks truly about reality while we are devoted to illusions. The “difficulty” may be that we are not too keen to embrace the truth, but prefer to embrace half-truths or lies.

There is, of course, no substitute for the verse-by-verse reading of the text, if one is truly to wrestle with it. There is some value, however, in attempting to summarize in advance some of the conclusions arising from this reading so that the reader of this commentary may possess something of a map for the journey. To this summarizing task we now turn.

Ecclesiastes in Historical Context

The Author and the Speaker

WHO WROTE THE book of Ecclesiastes, when did (s)he do it, and what did the author want to say? Ancient tradition held that Solomon, “son of David, king in Jerusalem” (1:1), was the author, writing in his weary old age. Although Solomon himself is never explicitly mentioned in the book (unlike the case in Prov. 1:1; 10:1; 25:1; Song 1:1), it is certainly true that his reign is evoked in numerous ways throughout its opening chapters (cf. Eccl. 1:12–2:11 especially with the account in 1 Kings 3–11).

Yet there are good reasons to believe that Solomon was not himself the author. Even in the “Solomonic” sections of the book, it seems evident from verses like 1:16 and 2:7, 9 that the “real” historical location of the speaker who refers to himself as “I” is at some distance from the era of Solomon. These verses imply numerous predecessors in Jerusalem, whereas Solomon had only one (David). It is not likely, moreover, that Solomon himself would tell us that he was king over Israel in Jerusalem (1:12), referring to his kingship in the past tense (as if there were a period in his life when he was functioning as a thinker but no longer as a king). Equally striking is that many of the later passages in Ecclesiastes appear to be written from a non-Solomonic point of view (i.e., from the perspective of the subject rather than the ruler, e.g., 5:8–9; 8:1–9).

We may add to all of this that the language of the book, taken as a whole, gives every indication of being later rather than earlier Hebrew—the language of the postexilic rather than the preexilic period.5 Finally, a fairly obvious point should be made, namely, that the speaker in passages like 1:12–18 (the “I” who was king) should not be confused with the author of the book who reports the speaker’s words and who refers to him in the third person as “he” (12:9–14; probably also at least 1:1; 7:27). Even if the speaker were Solomon (which he is probably not), the speaker is assuredly not the author of the book as it has been passed on to us. To claim otherwise would be a little like claiming that Jesus (the central and dominant “I”-speaker), and not John (who refers to Jesus as “he”), wrote John’s Gospel.

Further examination of both author and speaker is thus in order. Little can be mooted about the anonymous author other than that he was probably a postexilic writer6 who stood within the wisdom tradition of ancient Israel. The balance of historical probability favors the view that he was male, although nothing explicitly said in 12:9–14 necessitates this view. He reports the words of the speaker because he values them as some of the “words of the wise” (12:11), addressing them (and his own final advice) to his “son” (12:12), whether literal or metaphorical (cf., e.g., 1 Kings 20:35; 2 Kings 2:3, 5, for Heb. ben, son, in the sense of disciple, follower).

We find a similar concern in the book of Proverbs (e.g., Prov. 1:8, 10; 2:1) that wisdom should be passed on (whether by father or mother) to the “son” and understood and lived out by him. Like Ecclesiastes (e.g., Eccl. 12:13), Proverbs is anxious to remind its readers that “the fear of the LORD” is the foundation of true wisdom and knowledge (e.g., Prov. 1:7, 29; 2:5; 3:7; 8:13; 9:10).

If little that is specific can be said about the author, what of the speaker? We learn from the author that he, too, stands within the same wisdom tradition, gathering and reflecting on proverbial wisdom and seeking to arrive at its proper interpretation (Eccl. 12:9–10). Beyond this it is difficult to proceed with any certainty. Part of the reason is that the speaker himself is evidently capable of taking on personae other than his own in reflecting on the nature of the universe and of mortal life. He explores reality “as if” he were Solomon in 1:12–2:26, for example, imaginatively reenacting Solomon’s reign (“I . . . was king over Israel in Jerusalem”) in order to facilitate those aspects of his exploration of “life under the sun” that require the experience of great wealth and power and wisdom. He “becomes” a king within the world of the text (takes on “the Solomonic guise”7), in order to persuade his hearers of truths about the world as it is confronted by the wealthy, the powerful, and the wise—among whose ranks certainly number kings like Solomon.

In due course in the book, the speaker ceases to act out this royal character from his script and moves on to explore dimensions of human life that do not require him to speak “as if” he were a king. Commentators have for some reason often imagined that in these later parts we may more certainly assume that the “real” speaker is to be found and that we may use the text in these places to reconstruct his actual social and historical context. It is far from clear, however, that simply because passages like 4:13–16; 9:13–16; and 10:16–17 describe situations in which kings are involved, our speaker must himself have lived in a time of kings (sayings about kings are common in wisdom literature) or indeed himself have experienced the situations he describes. If he can imaginatively place himself in Solomon’s time for the purposes of communicating his message, he can assuredly place himself imaginatively in other times as well, drawing in “cases” from here and there that contribute to his overall scheme.

Yet this obvious fact has apparently eluded those many who have written so confidently about the political, social, and economic context out of which the speaker’s words arose, sometimes even mentioning specific historical events as the likely background to particular passages. The imagination of the commentator has not come near to reckoning with the imagination of the speaker.

Even the name or title that the speaker takes to himself conceals as much as it reveals. It is qohelet (1:12)—a feminine Qal participle from the verb qhl, which means “to assemble (as a group of people),”8 and the word that gives the book of Ecclesiastes its Hebrew name Qohelet. The associated common noun qahal refers to a group of assembled people, most frequently to the people of Israel gathered together for war (e.g., Judg. 20:2) or for a specifically religious purpose such as listening to God’s Word (e.g., Deut. 5:22) or worshiping (e.g., 2 Chron. 30:25). A qohelet was probably in origin a person who participated in—played an (unspecified) role in—an assembly (qahal). The Greek rendering of qohelet as ekklesiastes (from which we derive our English title for the book) captures this sense, for an ekklesiastes was a person who sat or spoke in an ekklesia (an assembly of local citizens).

The question is this: Is qohelet in 1:12, as well as in 1:1–2; 7:27; 12:9–10 (where it is either certainly or probably used by the author, referring to the speaker in the third person), likewise intended simply to be understood as referring to the role of the speaker in addressing the readers—most likely, in the biblical context, to be understood as all Israel gathered together in assembly? Or is it intended to be understood as a proper name (as soperet, originally “scribe,” has apparently become in Neh. 7:57; and as roles throughout history have characteristically in due course become names, as in the case of the common English name “Smith,” which originally refers to an occupation)? The term qohelet is entirely ambiguous. Despite what may at first be thought, the author does not help us to resolve the ambiguity in his usage of qohelet with the definite article in 12:8 (haqqohelet), for the proper name soperet itself appears in variant form as hassoperet in Ezra 2:55.

The author is indeed complicit in the veiling of the speaker behind the words in the main part of the book. He himself affirms in 1:1 the fiction of the opening chapters—that Qohelet (whoever or whatever this is) was “son of David, king in Jerusalem”—and in 12:9–14 he clarifies only what Qohelet did, not who he was.

In one respect, indeed, the author may be said to add to the veiling. The book as a whole claims or implies throughout, from 1:1 onwards, that the speaker is male. The world that provides the illustrations for the message of the book is indeed predominantly the male world (e.g., 4:13–16; 8:1–9; 9:13–18), and it is a book that envisages men as its primary audience (e.g., 9:9; 12:12). Consistent with this, the word qohelet, although a feminine participle, appears in virtually every place it is used alongside masculine verbs. The curiosity of this mixture of masculine and feminine forms is usually explained in terms of an occasional preference for the feminine gender in Hebrew when referring to someone’s role, even where the subject is masculine.9

What is more difficult convincingly to explain is the occurrence in 7:26–27, at precisely a point where women are explicitly the focus of attention (albeit from a resolutely male point of view), of qohelet with a feminine verb (ʾam^erah qohelet). It is generally claimed that this curiosity is the result of erroneous word division by the scribes who passed the text on to us and that the original text read ʾamar haqqohelet (as in 12:8). Yet there is not a jot of actual evidence that this most convenient of explanations is correct, and it is not even plausible as a hypothesis: Are we really to believe that a scribe, presumably knowing that qohelet occurs elsewhere in Ecclesiastes with masculine verbs and that the variant haqqohelet appears in 12:8, would have made such an error, creating a wise woman where in context there had only previously been a loose one? It is much more likely that the Masoretic word division is the original one, which has survived in spite of the difficulties it has caused many readers.

Taken seriously as such, the authorial insertion in 7:27 introduces an element of doubt into our minds about the gender of the speaker, for it makes us ask just how far our firm conviction that he is male arises from the same source as the firm convictions held by others that he is Solomon or that he finished his book around 198 B.C.10—namely, a failure to distinguish the speaker as he appears (in different guises) in the text from the speaker as he may truly and historically have been in reality.

The fact of the matter is that Qohelet is all but completely veiled behind the text of Ecclesiastes, subsumed by “his” words. (The) qohelet addresses the gathered readers/listeners, the Israelites, but all the emphasis falls on the words, not the speaker. There is no good reason to doubt that he existed and worked just as the author who quotes his words asserts to us (12:9–10); it would be curious to receive the speaker’s words from this author and yet reject his rather clear testimony about their originator.

It is clearly what the speaker said, however, not who he was or even when he said it, that this author wants us to understand. For this reason it is difficult to agree with the assertion that Ecclesiastes occupies the literary middle ground somewhere between ancient Near Eastern literature (including earlier biblical literature), whose canons required that the personality as well as the name of an author should remain concealed, and Greek literature, whose authors tended to proclaim their identity.11 The words dominate in Ecclesiastes even as the “I” speaks them, and in that sense Ecclesiastes is much like other books in the Old Testament, whose originators have taken great pains to retreat behind the words and to erase their footsteps.

It is one of the great ironies of modern biblical scholarship (of whatever theological and confessional complexion) that what the originators of Old Testament tradition have thus themselves pronounced unimportant about the text, its modern readers have pronounced crucial for its understanding, expending enormous and futile effort in an attempt to trace the erased footsteps across the sands of time and exhume their alleged owners’ corpses from their self-sealed tombs.

It is important, nonetheless, if only so that we can get on with writing about Ecclesiastes without endless qualifications and parentheses, that we refer to the producers of the words in the book by some agreed conventions. Following recent custom, therefore, we will refer in what follows to Qohelet (with a capital Q, yet not necessarily indicating a proper name) when referring to the speaker of most of the words. As we have already done in this Introduction, however, we will refer to the person who has passed on Qohelet’s words to us as the “author,” rather than as the “editor” or the “epilogist” (two common alternatives). The latter might give the impression that the role of the writer visible to us in 12:9–14 is limited to peripheral tinkering with an already preexisting book that passed, somehow, across his or her editorial desk.

This is, in fact, what many modern commentators have thought (albeit arguing among themselves about the extent of the tinkering). The fact of the matter is, however, that we know of no book of Ecclesiastes other than the one we have received from the hand of the writer of 12:9–14, and we possess no evidence that such a book ever existed. We possess only this writer’s version of what Qohelet had to say, in which his own and Qohelet’s words flow seamlessly together (as in 1:1–12, e.g., where we move gently from third person to first without quite being sure of where the “join” is; or 7:26–27, where we are suddenly reminded that Qohelet’s words are indeed being quoted to us by someone else). The term “author” is used to keep us mindful of such things.

The Message

WHAT WAS THE author of the book intent on saying? Was he saying much the same as Qohelet? From the earliest times, as we have seen, readers of Ecclesiastes were aware of the complex nature of the book, indeed of the “contradictions” in it, which for some of them (in combination with other perplexing aspects of the book) raised questions about its scriptural authority. Those who accepted its scriptural nature often tended to resort to a spiritualizing or allegorizing approach in addressing the problem. The perceived lack of a coherent message was, to all, religiously problematic in a book inspired by God.

In modern times marked by impatience with spiritualizing and allegorizing, on the one hand, and a more literal and historical mindset, on the other, this same perception of incoherence has issued in various attempts to account for the complexity of the book in terms of the alleged stages by which it was composed. The two broad theories that have attracted most support may be referred to as the “quotation theory” and the “addition theory.”

(1) The quotation theory holds that in the course of his argument Qohelet often quotes material with whose opinions he does not himself agree. He reproduces what is termed “traditional wisdom” only in order then to refute it. Verses like 2:16 and 9:10 were already regarded as quotations—what the “people” say—in earlier times (by the Targum and Ibn Ezra respectively). The quotation approach simply builds on these early beginnings, identifying greater or lesser numbers of citations in the text, sometimes to the extent of viewing the overall genre of the book as a dialogue between a master and his students or between two schools of thought. In this way Qohelet’s own thoughts can be distinguished from other, earlier material in the book and a coherent picture of his own philosophy attained.

The difficulty with this method of approaching the text, however, is to identify satisfactory criteria for identifying the proverbial wisdom with which Qohelet is thought to disagree. That he is interacting with such wisdom is clear enough—the epilogue to the book itself tells us this (12:9–10)—and we frequently find in its main part sayings lacking the truly distinctive marks of Qohelet’s writing, which could comfortably be accommodated within a book like Proverbs and which may well therefore be preexisting proverbs that Qohelet picks up and uses (e.g., 2:14; 4:5). That he often offers further comment on such proverbial wisdom, exploring how far it is true and where its limitations lie, is also implied in the epilogue (12:9, where Qohelet is said to have examined the proverbs thoroughly and have arrived at just the right interpretation) and evidenced in the main text (e.g., 2:14a, followed by 2:14b–16).

Yet there is no obvious reason even in these cases why we should believe that Qohelet completely disagrees with the wisdom he is citing, rather than embracing it while offering a qualification of it, nor indeed that this wisdom itself was ever intended by its original authors to be accepted without any kind of qualification. There is even less reason to believe these things in cases where Qohelet himself does not offer any explicit comment on a proverbial saying but simply juxtaposes material so that we may reflect on the totality together (e.g., 4:5 followed by 4:6). We are indeed justified in expecting that if disagreement were intended, Qohelet would have used recognized formulae to indicate this clearly in the text.12

The complexity of Ecclesiastes may well be diminished, then, by the ungrounded assumption that Qohelet rejects many of the ideas to which he gives expression, and the comfort level of the reader may perhaps be correspondingly and dramatically increased. Whether the “Qohelet” we are left with is anyone other than the product of our own limited imagination is, however, an important question.

(2) The addition theory holds that the explanation for the complexity of the book of Ecclesiastes lies in whole or in part, not in Qohelet’s utilization of earlier wisdom material with which he does not agree, but in interpolation into Qohelet’s text by a later editor or editors who were alarmed by the unorthodox nature of Qohelet’s thinking and wished to neutralize its most troubling aspects. Verses like 4:5; 5:3; and whole sections of chapters 7 and 10 are often said on this view so to interrupt the argument of the book that they cannot have been put there by Qohelet himself, but must have been added by an editor interested in wisdom literature. In the same way verses like 2:26; 3:17; and 8:2b, 3a, 5, 6a, 11–13 interrupt or contradict the main teachings of the book and must derive (it is said) from the hand of a Jewish orthodox glossator whose worldview was similar to the Pharisees and who wished to find support in a work of Solomon for orthodox religion.

Despite its popularity among modern commentators, however, the addition theory is implausible. We are apparently to believe that editors who fundamentally disagreed with the book’s sentiments nevertheless copied it, only lightly editing it as they went, and passed it on to later generations, rather than simply suppressing or ignoring it. We are to believe this in the complete absence of any convincing demonstration, across the whole breadth of the book, of the grounds for the belief—other than alleged inconsistency with Qohelet’s “real” thought (which is arbitrarily determined by focusing on some parts of Ecclesiastes rather than others)—and in the knowledge that the allegedly “secondary” material is often so closely linked syntactically to its context as to defy removal.

We are to believe it, further, even though the putative additions make little sense as additions designed to correct Qohelet, being in placement and content poorly designed for the task, and even though their removal does not in any case result in the completely “consistent” argument for which the theorists are searching. We are to believe it, finally, even though the only early character whom we actually know to have transmitted Qohelet’s words, and who speaks about them in 12:9–10, makes clear to us that he did so because he valued them—and this indeed is the obvious reason that someone would transmit them.13

It is, frankly, difficult in all the circumstances to believe in these hypothetical editors, although many commentators have done so. These commentators too have managed by such means to arrive at a less complex Qohelet than the one presented to us in the text; but he is not likely to be a Qohelet who ever existed, even in the mind of the author of Ecclesiastes. It is one of the ironies of modern interpretation of Ecclesiastes, indeed, that while quotation and addition theorists have often looked critically and condescendingly on earlier exegetes whom they have characterized as “precritical” in their allegorizing and spiritualizing of the text and have accused them of fantasy in their reading of it, these theorists too have by means of their theorizing managed no less than their predecessors to make the text say just what they wanted it to say.

One of the intriguing questions about this whole discussion of contradiction, quotation, and addition is why, in the first place, we should expect Qohelet or the book of Ecclesiastes as a whole to be less than complex. It is a book that grapples with reality, and reality is complex. Should the words of a wise man about reality not be difficult to simplify? After all,

Yet commentator after commentator has agonized over the book as if it, rather than they, had a problem, because it is resistant to linear, systematic treatment. This has particularly been the case in the last two centuries, as commentators influenced by positivistic science in general and by Darwinian social evolutionary theory in particular have come to share a narrow view of reality in general and of Israel’s past in particular. This is a world of logical black and white and of linear progress or regress in ideas. It is a world of hermetically sealed entities like “traditional wisdom teaching” or “deuteronomic schools,” whose adherents apparently only and always hold fully and consistently to their own stated beliefs and views, and who are constantly looking to subvert, undermine, and suppress those who disagree with them and to win the argument.

Complexity in such a world is a sure sign that things that should be separate have become confused, probably deliberately and with ideological purpose—a sign that one idea is in truth earlier or later than another, or at least from a different intellectual stable than another. Thus is the (apparently) ideal world of the modern scholar superimposed not only on the real and messy world of the present, but also on the equally real and likely just as messy world of the past. Wildly implausible constructs result.

In the present context the most important of these implausible constructs is “traditional wisdom teaching,” which is alleged by many to have been either the entity that Qohelet was reacting against or the entity that set out to (help) devour this skeptical heretic after the fact. It is allegedly the proponents of traditional wisdom teaching as is found in books like Proverbs, to whose narrow dogma about the way in which the world works Qohelet is objecting (e.g., the claim that righteous people are blessed and wicked people suffer); and it is their dogma that is essentially reimposed by Qohelet’s editors.

Yet it is far from clear why we should assume such a dichotomy between Qohelet and the broader wisdom context and on that basis go searching for their allegedly straightforward worldviews. That there have been throughout the ages numerous Israelites, and later Jews, of dogmatic and narrow outlook need not be questioned; Job’s comforters stand as the most famous literary examples of what we may assume was a wider historical phenomenon (and one by no means restricted to this one religious grouping, as any cursory review of Christian history will reveal). It is also reasonable to believe that Qohelet may have had some of these compatriots in mind as he wrote.

These assumptions, however, do not permit us to make any generalized assertion about the nature of “traditional wisdom,” as if “traditional wisdom” were all the same kind of thing until some imagined day in Israel’s history when enlightenment dawned and writers like Qohelet came to the fore. One might well think from the way in which this issue has sometimes been discussed that no Israelite ever noticed in earlier times, for example, that righteous people are not always blessed and wicked people are far from always suffering, and that every early Israelite thinker considered the world a perfectly ordered and comprehensible place, capable of comprehensive description in pithy proverbs. Unlike the assumptions mentioned above, however, this is certainly not a reasonable one. It stretches credulity, in fact, and there is no evidence to justify us in making it.

The book of Proverbs certainly cannot be cited in support of it. Proverbs for the most part does not tell us anything about what the earliest users of proverbs thought about them and how they used them; rather, it simply records some of the proverbs that formed the basis of their reflection and use. It does not for the most part enable us, for example, to form any sure impression of how far these early Israelites thought the proverbs absolutely or only situationally true, or of how far they believed the truth of an individual proverb stretched, and which limitations (if any) they believed to apply in each individual case.

It would again be a reasonable assumption that individual readers of the proverbs might well disagree with each other on this kind of point, given the variety of individual experience and wisdom they would be bringing to the task of interpretation. Proverbs, by their very nature brief and usually self-standing entities (with no true literary context to help the reader with their meaning), demand this kind of individual engagement with them in order to ascertain what they mean. They demand reflection. Occasionally the book of Proverbs itself forcibly underlines the point, as in Proverbs 26:4–5:

It is particularly clear from this juxtaposition that the authors of the book of Proverbs were not of the opinion that proverbs could provide ethical guidance at no cost to the intellect. The two proverbs together demand that the reader think carefully about the question of “answering the fool” before acting, taking into consideration such things as the circumstances and the inner motivation for responding. The reader must, in other words, examine the proverbs carefully and “set them in order” (understand their relationship to each other and to the larger empirical reality), if the correct conclusions are to be drawn from them.

It is, of course, this task of examining and “ordering” proverbs that the author of Ecclesiastes attributes to Qohelet himself (12:9–10), setting him firmly within the wisdom tradition. That is what Qohelet observably does in the course of his speaking. He considers what proverbial wisdom has to say about the world, and he presses on to see how far it is true and which qualifications exist in respect of its individual statements. If, for example, there are proverbs that speak of the “profit” that comes from hard work (Heb. motar, Prov. 14:23; 21:5), Qohelet still wishes to press the question whether in the end human beings have any “advantage” over the animals (Heb. motar, Eccl. 3:19). In what sense do mortal beings know “profit” in life? Of what kind of profit are we speaking?

In this endeavor of examining and ordering, Qohelet contrasts with Job’s friends. These “comforters” present to us a rather different picture of how to handle “wisdom”—a less critical, less thoughtful, and in the end much less helpful treatment. There is no reason to think, however, that Qohelet is reacting to some hypothetical, monolithic “wisdom tradition” in what he says, nor is there any reason to imagine that his affirmations (as well as his qualifications) of “traditional wisdom” are not seriously and sincerely meant. He is responding to a messy universe. That is why, in the end, his book is somewhat messy, nonlinear, and nonsystematic. Its form mirrors its content and its focus of interest. It is difficult to see how any author of intelligence and integrity could approach a complicated universe in a markedly different way.

This commentary does not, in sum, regard the message of the book of Ecclesiastes as explicable in terms of a reconstructed “traditional wisdom” rejected by or rejecting of a reconstructed Qohelet, whose views are somehow known to us apart from the reading of the book that gives us access to his words. It approaches this book, rather, by taking its own closing statements about its nature seriously and expecting to find throughout its pages the unified though complex whole that these statements imply. Qohelet had something to say that is knowledge and truth (12:9–10), which the author has passed on to his readers because it is valuable. This being clear, we are now in a position to go on and sketch the broad outlines of what this knowledge and truth consist in.

The author himself, in concluding the book, sets the whole of Qohelet’s teaching in the context of reverence for and obedience to God, who has created a moral universe in which there is accountability for actions (12:13–14). He does so with ample justification in terms of Qohelet’s teaching itself, quite apart from the wider scriptural context. It is not simply that Qohelet himself refers explicitly to this foundation of his own thinking and teaching, although he does do this. His reflection on the “times” of human existence in 3:1–17, for example, refers both to reverence for God as something appropriate for human beings (3:14; cf. also 5:7, where he exhorts the worshiper to reverence, and 7:18; 8:12) and to the “time of judgment” that awaits all when the moral corruption of the world is confronted by God (3:16–17).

Qohelet returns to the theme of judgment in 8:1–9, advising the wise man at court who is faced with a foolish ruler to remember that there is a time for everything, including divine judgment on foolishness and wickedness (8:5–6). In 11:9 the young man is urged to live his life in the certain knowledge of divine judgment. More broadly than this, however, it is also apparent that everywhere (although often implicitly rather than explicitly) the “two ways” through life as described throughout Proverbs and in a psalm like Psalm 1 lie in the background of Ecclesiastes.

The categories of sinner and righteous appear in 2:26 as well as 3:17, for example (note also the conjunction of the wicked and the God-fearing in 8:12–13), and the categories of wise and foolish are frequently to be found throughout (correlated with “righteous” and “wicked/sinner,” e.g., in 9:1–2). If Qohelet has some qualifications to offer concerning wisdom, he has no doubt that “wisdom is better than folly” (2:13), and he therefore also offers voluminous wisdom to his readers, expecting that they will be the better for it (e.g., in 7:1–22; 10:1–20). This advice is offered, as in Proverbs, in the context of belief in a Creator God who loves what is right and hates what is wrong.

It is this overarching backdrop to Qohelet’s thought that makes it so inexplicable that commentators have sometimes characterized him as a hedonist. They have done so on the basis of passages like 2:24–26; 3:12–13, 22; 5:18–20; 9:7–10; and 11:9–10, which commend such things as eating, drinking wine, and enjoyment of wife, work, wealth, and possessions. Yet it is patently obvious that God himself is prominently present in all the passages just mentioned. God is the One who enables the eating, drinking, and enjoyment of work (2:24–25); who gives mortals as a gift both the days in which joy can be found and enjoyment and contentment (3:12–13; 5:18–20); who smiles on these human activities (9:7–10); and who sets their moral boundaries (11:9–10). There is pleasure here, to be sure, and enjoyment of the good things of life, but it is pleasure received from God’s hand and joy expressed in his presence.

This way of being is by no means antithetical to faith in God as far as Qohelet is concerned, and it is certainly not antithetical to the morally good life (note esp. the reference to “doing good” in 3:12). That both aspirant orthodox Christian commentators and those neither orthodox nor Christian have seen antitheses here tells us much more about them and their fractured thinking and living than about Qohelet. It reminds us that all sorts of people would prefer, for their own personal and cultural purposes, that God and creation should not be so closely identified as they are in the Bible. Qohelet, however, understands what the confession that God created the world and made it good (Gen. 1) truly means. We cannot have God without embracing his world, and we cannot in the end have the world without embracing God.

This brings us neatly to consider next the more troubled and gloomy tone in Ecclesiastes, which marks out significant sections of the book and has so often grasped the attention of readers to the exclusion of the other material we have considered to this point. The parts of Qohelet’s discourse that have this tone are best understood, in my opinion, only in relation to the obviously hortatory passages, which he directs at his hearers in the hope of leading them to think and live in a certain way. They are designed to gain a hearing for Qohelet’s more positive advice by dispelling false consciousness about the world and by undermining false dreams and hopes.

The general heading under which all of this gloomier material is presented is found in 1:2 and 12:8, which enclose all of Qohelet’s other words: “Everything is meaningless,” according to the NIV, but better translated as “Everything is a breath” (see the comments on 1:1–11). As a consideration of the whole book reveals, the emphasis lies on the passing nature of existence and on its elusiveness and resistance to intellectual and physical human control. The main obstacle to living well in the world is that mortal beings consistently refuse to accept their mortality and finitude. Qohelet sets out to convince them of these. It is not insignificant in this context that his positive advice to his hearers (esp. in 9:7–10) is similar to the advice given in the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh to the hero Gilgamesh, in the context of his search for immortality:

Gilgamesh is thus dissuaded from his quest and encouraged to accept the limitations of human existence. The Bible as a whole sets the entirety of human existence as we know it within the context of such a failed human attempt to become “like God” (Gen. 3), deriving from a refusal to accept divinely ordained boundaries. It is against this background that Qohelet speaks, seeking to persuade his hearers of the futility of this ongoing human quest and thus to save them from a life that is itself characterized by futility.

Qohelet’s two favorite targets, as we will see, are the pursuit of knowledge and the pursuit of wealth. The universe, he argues, is beyond human comprehension and cannot be fathomed. Wisdom may indeed be better than folly, but wisdom does not enable us to give a comprehensive account of reality and thus provide us with the means somehow to control it (e.g., 1:1–18; 2:12–16; 3:11; 7:23–29). The pursuit of wealth is likewise a futile chase, for one cannot guarantee even if one attains it that one will be able to keep it, use it, or pass it on to one’s descendants. The possession of wealth does not in any case inevitably lead to the possession of fulfillment and of joy (e.g., 2:1–11, 17–23; 4:7–8; 5:10–17; 6:1–6).

Overshadowing all such human attempts to overcome the limitations set to life is the ultimate empirical reality that demonstrates they cannot: death. It is above all death that mocks human attempts at godlikeness, and to this subject Qohelet constantly returns. Death brings the wise man and the fool in the end to the same place (2:12–16), and it renders futile a life devoted to the accumulation of wealth (2:17–23). Death, which lies in the future, should persuade the young man to embrace life in the present (11:7–12:8). It is the reality of death that makes rational the way of life that Qohelet commends to all his readers, with its focus on living each moment of life joyfully before God rather than on the pursuit of wisdom, wealth, or any other human end that comes under the heading “chasing after the wind” (1:14, 17, and throughout the book).

Death, after all, comes to everyone, whether wise or foolish, rich or poor, good or bad (e.g., 9:1–6); there is no way in which human beings can avoid it. It is best therefore to give up any attempt to control destiny and simply to live life out before God. This “simple living” involves human activities like work and wealth-creation; it also involves the employment of wisdom. These activities will be undertaken in the fear of God, however, and with no illusions about the nature of the universe or about what can be humanly achieved within it. Undertaken in this way, we can find joy whether in work or in wealth and find in wisdom valuable help for living.

Ecclesiastes in the Modern Context

OUR ATTEMPTS TO understand the text of Ecclesiastes in its own terms, as outlined above and developed in the commentary, come under the heading of Original Meaning. It is, of course, already the case as we consider this original meaning that we are already doing so in the context of some broader, fundamental assumptions about how Ecclesiastes fits into the Bible as a whole—this is already apparent in our discussion above. It is impossible to seal off the original meaning of a text entirely from all other meanings, as if it could be grasped completely objectively by the reader before anything else were considered. It is nevertheless a useful exercise to consider Ecclesiastes somewhat in isolation from the remainder of the Bible in the first instance, lest we are tempted too quickly to merge it into the rest of the Bible and in so doing miss its distinctive contribution to the Scriptures.

The Original Meaning sections in this commentary (as in the entire commentary series) are thus separated from others headed Bridging Contexts and Contemporary Significance, in which we wrestle in a more focused way with questions such as these:

Although we cannot be sure about the precise historical background of the book of Ecclesiastes, it seems clear from the content of the book that the world into which Qohelet is speaking is not entirely dissimilar from our own world. We, too, live in a world in which there is much “toiling after gain,” as people strive to get ahead of the game of life and exercise control over their lives. The oppression and injustice that such a pursuit of gain and advancement all too often produces is as much a feature of our own world as it is of Qohelet’s (e.g., 4:1–3), and it is as obvious in our world as in Qohelet’s that joy and fulfillment do not automatically flow from this pursuit.

In extensive parts of the Western world, indeed, the ever-more-frantic pursuit of such things is evidently accompanied by spiritual emptiness and world-weariness, as people strive to achieve what they can never possess by the means they have chosen for the attempt. One important aspect of the pursuit is the part played by knowledge and technique. At the heart of the chase lies a conviction that the universe is ultimately comprehensible and therefore malleable; it can be fashioned to our own ends. Accumulating human wisdom can be brought to bear upon it, enabling the constant march of progress towards a universal, or at least a personal, utopia.

At the same time, however, the weakness of empirical inquiry as a foundation for human life has never been so evident. The information explosion has resulted in individual human beings knowing more and more about less and less, since no one can possibly process all the “facts” that exist in order to arrive at overarching truths about the universe in which we live. It may be true, as the popular TV show The X-Files has it, that “the truth is out there,” but what that truth is, how it may be known, and what it means for living are to many people unclear.

Overshadowing everything in our world, as in Qohelet’s, is the reality of death. It is a reality that in part drives the insane rush after gain, as people try to protect themselves from death and seize everything from life that can be seized before it is taken away. At the same time it is a reality denied and dismissed from public discourse—the Christian thinker Francis Schaeffer once called death “the 20^th century’s pornography”—since it is common knowledge that it is coming and that it renders much of life futile; yet there is no common knowledge about how to handle it. Death is, in our world as in Qohelet’s, the ultimate reality of life that demonstrates the universe cannot be “handled” by human beings at all.

Qohelet’s world is not so different from our world; this means it is not a difficult task on the whole to apply his message to ourselves. (1) It is first of all a message for those who cling still to the world of illusion, which is daily and powerfully presented to us as substantial reality by our various media. Qohelet dispels our illusions. The universe is not comprehensible and malleable. We cannot make any lasting mark on it. We cannot by pursuing wisdom or wealth find fulfillment and joy. Death, in particular, mocks all attempts at elevation to divinity and the refusal to be mortal and human.

(2) It is also a message for those who understand all this and are looking for a different way of thinking and living—who are seeking to replace illusion with truth. Qohelet says to such people: Understand that God exists. The universe we inhabit comes from his hand and comes to us as a gift. Our lives are a gift, offered for a short period and then taken back once again. Embrace life for what it is, rather than what you would like it to be. Live it out before God, reverencing and obeying him. This is the pathway on which joy lies, even though puzzlement and pain will also be found there, and there are never guarantees about how things will turn out.

Christian readers of Ecclesiastes, of course, know more than Qohelet did about God and about God’s plans for the world and for individual human beings. We know, for example, about resurrection and new life. We are therefore able, among other things, to solve a puzzle that Qohelet himself does not solve: how divine justice is ultimately delivered in the universe and how in the end it goes better with God-fearers than with the wicked (8:12–13).

Qohelet holds on firmly to belief in the moral coherence of the universe; yet what he sees is that every living creature dies without any apparent distinction among them (2:15–16; 3:18–21), that the wicked can live longer and more fully than the righteous (7:15), and that in general righteous people can get what the wicked deserve and vice versa (8:14; 9:1–2). He is agnostic about what happens after death (3:21). That justice will be done is therefore clear in Ecclesiastes; how it will be done is unclear. We require the remainder of the Bible, both Old Testament and (especially) New Testament, to arrive at a fuller picture.

Nevertheless, the more extensive truth that Christians have on this topic and on others, although it expands on Qohelet’s message, does not undermine it or make it less important that we listen to it. That Christians have even greater reason for faith and obedience and an even deeper foundation for joy than Qohelet does not mean we must heed less his warnings about illusions and his advocacy of a better way. For Christians are still called to live in this world that God has created and loves, even while anticipating a world to come. We are no less in need, therefore, of advice about living (as well as about waiting), about the pitfalls of wealth and wisdom, about the folly of attempting to control our destinies, about the importance of living life fully and daily in the certain knowledge of death, about the centrality of God to the good life, and about our response to puzzlement and pain.

Ecclesiastes, as part of the Scripture that is given us for shaping faith and life, offers us such advice, correlating as it does so with extensive sections of the New Testament that also touch on such themes. In focusing our attention on this life rather than the next, indeed, this book contributes to the correction of an all-too-frequent imbalance throughout the ages in Christian thinking, which has sometimes presented Christianity as if it were more a matter of waiting for something than a matter of living.