Ecclesiastes: Koheleth's Solomonic Meditation by Christopher Seitz

Dr. House, Paul, for those kind words. It is a pleasure to be here with you. Time flies, so does the tornado. So my talk for today is as titled: 'Koheleth' is the Hebrew word for 'the preacher,' the one who gathers in assembly, 'kahal.' I'll be talking about that today: his Solomonic meditation. Just a few words. I know you have the text totally memorized; there is a Bible that you can look at that will help you from time to time. Five things in the design of the book I want to stress. In here, there is a motto: 'Vanity of vanities, all is vanity,' and it's at the beginning and the end of the book. There is an epilogue that follows that, the last verses of the book. There's an opening poem. I say that because the body of the work really begins in 1:12, where he says, 'I, Koheleth,' he introduces himself and begins to talk. So I'll be looking at the effect of that opening poem, and then there is a middle point of the book that I want to pay attention to. We okay? Yeah, please. There's a guy who knows what he's doing. All right, now I hope I can find my slides. Can I do it? Okay, good. Good. Well, you'll be here. I've chosen the title with a lot of forethought. That is to say, let me let much of my talk be an explanation of this title: 'Koheleth's Solomonic Meditation.' Ecclesiastes, more than any other book, I think, requires the proper starting point, the proper angle of vision. It needs a reader coming to it with the right kind of expectations, and that way the reader will read the book properly and find then the book reading her or him. The idea of reading any biblical text neutrally, or any text for that matter, is, I think, just naive. We have to know where we're going when we start to go. The book of Ecclesiastes has a protagonist, not an intermittent one, and not one who shares the stage with other people. Sometimes that's been argued to account for the contradictions in the book, as though the protagonist is shadowboxing. No, the book does not make this an obvious feature at all. One protagonist introduced simply as Koheleth, who never for a moment leaves the stage. I think this makes the book unusual. One insightful critic calls this feature of the book that which sets it apart from other Old Testament books: 'Ecclesiastes places before us a single brooding consciousness.' I like that. He's introduced at the start, and all it follows is his brooding self inhabiting every single verse until we exit the book at what sounds like his last dying words, which I preached on a few days ago. So who is this Koheleth? His name is enigmatic, probably, I think, intentionally so. It seems to point to a function as much as a personal name, so much that he might even be called 'the Koheleth.' That happens at the end; you'll see in the last example: 'Vanity of vanity,' says 'ha-Kohelet,' the Koheleth. Who is he then? It's tied up with what he does; it's defined by that. So what does it mean to 'koheleth'? The verb in Hebrew has to do with assembling or collecting things, 'kahal.' We might think of this as assembling things, perhaps difficult sayings, wise sayings—that would make a lot of sense. Yet when this vocation of Koheleth is described at the close of the book—'Koheleth taught people knowledge, weighing and studying and arranging'—that's not the verb that is used, and the verb is never used in that sense in the book. The alternative is to think of Koheleth as gathering people, or relatedly, gathering not things but wisdom, riches, wives, and property—those are things, of course—but I think primarily to think of him in the framework of gathering people. The Ecclesiast, though he does gather things, we notice negative, garish, pointless accumulation, as he will see it, like when the people cry out for manna and quails and get so much of it it comes out their nostrils, or when stored goods go foul. The tradition saw the gathering of people, when it spoke of the Ecclesiast, however, as one who gathers a solemn assembly, an ecclesia, 'the preacher' Luther translated. Yet it may be that this more positive role is intended to sit rather uneasily against the notion of vain accumulation; they're sort of vying for each other: the accumulator who more properly ought to be an Ecclesiast, a proper role gone wrong, as the book will show. Now I want to park the discussion on this point for now so as to underscore the second item in the title. I would note here the density of the verb being used and the noun being used in 1 Kings 8, and in another essay I call attention to this. I think that's where the root idea comes from for choosing this name. Here Solomon is gathering and gathering and gathering in a positive sense. Koheleth's Solomonic meditation. I've referred to something like a Solomonic trio yesterday as preferable to classifications of the more recent time like 'wisdom literature' and spoke in some detail about that yesterday. Ecclesiastes is in some way related to Solomon by virtue of its close association with Proverbs and Song of Songs. But the key here, I think, is 'in some way.' Those books, Proverbs and Song of Songs, make it unmistakable that Solomon is the protagonist or author in some sense of the book. Our book, however, flirts with the idea: 'I, Koheleth'—not 'I, Solomon'—'I, Koheleth, was king in Jerusalem.' The book itself never uses the word 'Solomon.' Koheleth is how it wishes to speak of the single brooding consciousness, and Koheleth has been a king in Jerusalem. With that comes all the proper associations we might have of a temptation to over-accumulate, and Solomon fits the bill. But it can't be an accident, I don't think, that the book chooses not to name him. It belongs to the intention to evoke Solomon but also let Koheleth be himself. Hence 'Koheleth's Solomonic'—that is an adjective, not a noun—'meditation.' The book is adjectivally Solomonic, not nominally him. The ancients also recognized this fact. Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, and Didymus—they saw the association, but more significantly, they also noted the omission of the name as critical to proper interpretation. Didymus, I have a quote here from him: 'The Spirit is the author of the divine scriptures. Maybe we ought to opt for not thinking of it as Solomon, so that nobody may say this is chiefly autobiography.' Now the idea of authorship, as you will know, particularly in conservative-liberal debates, was debated with high seriousness in recent centuries, but I think this failed properly to understand the character of the book's what I would call 'studied association' with Solomon. To introduce registers like 'authentic' or 'fictional' fails to take seriously what is not being said by the book. This is Koheleth's book, and it is Solomonic only by attending to what it as a book has to say in the manner in which it says it. Evocation is what we are dealing with, I think that's the best way to think of that. A 'prosopological' is another way to talk about that; maybe look at that in the question and answer. This has nothing to do with authorship in the manner debated in modernity. The arguments for the late date of the book due to the history of the Hebrew language are probably correct in their own way, but they may equally mislead us as to their ultimate utility. Adjectival, an evocation to speak in the name of another person. And the very fact that the Wisdom of Solomon and Ben Sira in its own way evoke Solomon but never mention him is, I think, akin with this. And that brings us nicely then to the third term: 'meditation.' I'd be open to alternatives, but the word 'meditation' to my ear suggests a combination of three things: instruction, that is something didactic in nature—it's particularly clear at the end of the book that way, it's sort of like Proverbs, 'Beware, my son,' it's got that same kind of context. Rumination is another word that comes to my mind. The book goes over the same territory again and again and again because our hero is trying to find his way. The terrain is rough, the subject matter resists objective formulation and resolution. He's ruminating like a cow chewing on something. And finally, I think the other way to get at this is confession, confession being the recognition that God must be addressed as the proprietor of true wisdom, and one can't just go accumulate this kind of thing. He talks at the beginning about accumulating wisdom as though you put these things in a bag, one thing after another. No, wisdom comes as a gift, and only sometimes a gift after failure and a grim face-to-face with one's pride and vanity. If all this is on the right track, thrown in for extra points is how we should approach the theme word of the book: its brooding distillate, 'hevel hevalim.' Yeah, it's funny. Ray van Leeuwen, my colleague in Canada, says you should never translate this; you just leave it 'hevel hevalim' and make people learn Hebrew. I always liked that. There's a certain—I like 'vanity' in a way because the book then defines the term rather than the other way around, since we don't use 'vanity' very much as a word. 'Hevel hevalim.' If you read the commentaries, particularly in modernity, you'll see that three options dominate. The first one is that 'hevel' ought to be translated 'absurd,' 'meaningless.' This is a sort of Jean-Paul Sartre sort of idea. This suggests, to my ear, that something outside of Koheleth is fundamentally awry and cantankerously and infuriatingly so. Creation, perhaps God himself, is awry, and that creates the riposte 'absurd.' Here we have James Crenshaw and others. It kind of fits their character too, doesn't it, in a way? I mean, sort of like you're looking at yourself in a lot of ways in this book. Another possibility is 'transient' or 'fleeting.' This is better, I think; it's closer to the ground root of the word having to do with breath, 'hevel,' or vapor, exhalation, CO2, lacking generative potential. But like 'absurd,' it keeps the characterization at some distance from Koheleth himself. To be sure, the world is fleeting, 'hevel.' It's funny—I think it must be significant that the same word is the word for Abel in Genesis. He's here and he's gone tomorrow. It's a sort of—and there's something kind of nonsensical about it. He didn't do anything wrong; he got up, he had his role, and his brother had his role. I prefer 'ungraspable,' although I don't know how I would render it in a commentary. I wouldn't mind writing one, in the sense that Koheleth wants to assemble and organize things that defeat his efforts, and I would say purposefully so. So this Solomonic meditation, rumination, and confession. It's for this reason that those who now argue for a genuine structure and design to the book—one admittedly not easy to see—are right. I think there is a single brooding consciousness that broods toward something probably not obvious to himself when he starts, but he finally reaches a goal at the end, a goal ironically established by surrender and confession, a letting go. The accumulator in a position to be an Ecclesiast after all, gathering people before the admonition at the end of the book: 'Fear God, keep his commandments, that is life. The end of the matter, all has been heard.' Koheleth has shared his Solomonic meditation and shown himself in the end, through trial and surrender, to be wise. The one who had it all in fact had nothing, and the one who has nothing finds everything. At this point, I want to do a quick walkthrough of the book, choosing select passages. This will be a little bit like a torpedo tube, I fear. I think in a way, though, my sense of canonical interpretation is very simple: you cannot know parts unless you know the whole. You have to have a sense of the whole of the thing in order to understand its ingredients. That would be the simplest way I think to talk about canonical reading, but that's also ambitious for something like this. How do we look at the whole book? That's why I just have a few nodal points that I at least know: there's an epilogue, a middle point, an opening poem. First, the angle of vision. The angle of vision the book asks us to follow, I believe, is Solomon in old age, an old Koheleth whose gaze is retrospective in the light of that and pedagogical. Old age—we hear that particularly in chapter 12, which I preached on: the teeth are falling out, the body's been startled by noises and things. But throughout the book, the gaze is retrospective and pedagogically driven. Because of that, the end of the book makes crystal clear—and I'm going to turn again to the text—but it can be seen elsewhere as well. The book assumes the single brooding consciousness is looking back on things. He is in the midst of learning and will have learned his lesson. This is what makes the meditation tinged with a confessional tone. The opening chapters, this is 1:12 to 2:23, is often called the Koheleth's great test. He describes his grand building and amassing and concludes that as something now behind him, that it was 'hevel,' chasing after wind. The tone of the book is of having tried things out and found out the real story in the end. A distinct sense of old age and approaching death is conveyed at the close. A world is coming to an end, his own. He reaches out to admonish. Final words are always pregnant and heavy-laden, and especially those of Koheleth. Many like to speak of an epilogue. You can see here in this text: he's looking back, 'I considered what my hands had done, his days are full of pain, vanity.' So for all his days, many like to speak of an epilogue beginning at verse 12:9. I think this is right. It's obvious enough that Koheleth has stopped talking and that others are talking about him. 'Besides being wise, Koheleth taught the people,' and so forth. It's like a jacket blurb on the back of a book, you know: 'I said, please read this, this is what it's about.' The language of epilogue is, however, usually invoked to declare the last verses are a correction of something too extreme in the book, even an effort to secure a hearing by means of introducing this sort of pious figure after the fact. But when one understands the final section as that place the book has been heading, and the place of aged retrospection with which the book starts, the idea of discordance falls to the side. Precisely in his sober approach to death and in his newly, finally acquired upper-level wisdom, he is commendable. He has come to teach us: wisdom has a beginning in the fear of the Lord, and so too it has an end. 'My son, beware of any beyond these. This is life as it is, the whole duty of man.' I've referred to the beginning of the book, and so I will go there now. As indicated, often the epilogue is called a framing device which negotiates an uncooperative or unorthodox Koheleth by speaking over his head to the reader. I don't agree with this evaluation, but I accept the notion of a frame supplied by editors, which means to link the book to Proverbs and to hold them as bookends. Rarely does one use the same terminology to speak of a frame in the front of the book, but I think there is one. But the technique is more subtle. It's notable that Koheleth is clear stepping onto the stage. If you have a text in front of you, you can see this does not happen until 12 verses in the first chapter: 'I, Koheleth, was king over Israel.' This begins a 33-verse soliloquy running to the end of chapter 2, which orients this single brooding consciousness to follow. Frame then means to point to the obvious symmetry of verse 2, 'Vanity of vanities, all is vanity,' and the final refrain at 12:9. This leaves out, however, what I'm calling the opening poem. It's just a vague way of putting it. There's not time, I think, to unpack the meaning of these opening verses in a line-by-line commentary. These are verses 3 through 8. But this is a crucial text to get right, I think. If you get this text wrong, you got the whole book wrong. And a lot of it turns on how to translate it. This much I would say: the poem is not about the futility of the created order. That's often the way commentators read it. I could say I know exactly where you're going in and how you handle that opening poem. I think the opposite is the case. The movement of creation bears witness to the order and majesty of God's providential design. Its closest analogy is found in the divine verdict after the flood; the rainbow is its heavenly seal and bond. God has planted a bulwark against the flood. Psalm 19 is right alongside these opening verses: 'In them he set a tent for the sun, which comes rushing out like a bridegroom and a strong man, and then it returns on its course.' The patterns of movement of water and sky and wind are purposely genius. The wind doesn't blow itself out; the seas run to the sea, the rivers run to the sea, but they never overfill. Everything is coordinated perfectly, just as Genesis had held out. The contrast in the opening poem is about human faculties. 'Things are futile' is the way it's often translated. I would argue that the issue here is human faculties. Words proliferate; words are futile; they can't account for things. The eye never sees things up; the ear never hears things up. Compared with this, the order and steadiness and contentment of creation—we think there are things new that seriously matter, but in fact we've forgotten their prior appearance. The iPhone doesn't count; it's not truly new, it's just an iteration of something that really isn't very important to begin with, and it will be forgotten. So it goes. That's the fact of life. Our faculties are myopic; they're short-sighted; they can't do the job we imagine that they can. Of course, at the end of life, we discover this quite clearly. The trouble comes we learn very quickly in trying to live outside of these bounds, trying to break through them. Recently, it's been helpfully observed that Koheleth's grand experiment in the next chapters—this is the text from Genesis 8 I had in mind: 'While earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, night and day will never cease.' They belong to a goodly order. Recently, it's been helpfully observed that Koheleth's experiment upon which he looks ruefully back again has taken its cues directly from Genesis. In Genesis, we hear, 'Let there be light,' and God made light, and there was light; God saw that it was good. This is under usurpation now by a godlike Koheleth: 'Let there be gardens, let there be riches, let there be grand frenzied business buildings,' and Koheleth saw that it was 'hevel.' So there's a kind of—he tried to create a Garden of Eden of his own, and he saw that it was 'hevel.' This is not a bitter account of why bad things happen to good people; it's a conscious self-parodying by someone who had sought to break the rules set down by God east of Eden, who ruefully but I think in a tone of somber recognition takes note of that. To state it again, Koheleth's self-description in the clothing of super-Solomon is self-parodying. It's not meant as a photographic recounting of his acquisitional self but intentionally exaggerates for pedagogical purposes, to teach us, in order to display his penitential grasp of things now looking back. 'And I saw that it was all vanity and a chasing after wind' in that sense. And to summarize, we can speak of an omniscient frame in place at the beginning poem and at the end. We are told what this created, godlike state of affairs is concerning the world in which Koheleth does his reflecting at the start, and are meant to see this transgressed by what Koheleth immediately describes following. This is how he means to teach us: 'I tried this way; do not do the same.' The final framing in what is called the epilogue confirms that Koheleth was reliable. He taught in a tough way; his words are like goads, but his words are mature. Bookend on the enterprise called wisdom: Solomon the young composed Proverbs, rules of the road. Solomon's—Koheleth's Solomonic meditation shows up; it shows us the exceptions to the rules. Proverbs introduces the paradigms, which like all grammars have to simplify to get started. Strong verbs appear first, but strong verbs are often verbs we really don't use at all. Weak verbs in all languages are really the verbs we use day to day; they are the thick words that live deep down in life. Dr. Gignilliat is teaching you the pain, the final he, and the pain nuns and all that—those are the tough ones, but that's what life is like really. Those are where language gets used. The sayings of the wise are like goads, sharp-edged in order to get our attention and to steer us often against our wills. Koheleth tried this way; he learned a lesson, and he imparts his wisdom as he approaches death. This is what Luther called the second use of the law, meant to break us down so that our eyes might be redirected and lifted to our Creator. Wisdom had a beginning in Proverbs, and it has an end. I've argued in another place that the Fourth Gospel has the same basic idea at the end. Like Koheleth, when it draws to a close, it's always hard to identify borrowing; probably easier to say great minds think alike. 'Of the making of many books there is no end.' Now I suppose if all the things that Jesus did were written down, the world could not contain the books that could be written. To my ear and on Calvin's—I always go to check with him; he usually gets these things right—the image is not a positive one. It's not the romantic idea of 'gee, what a great man, and wow, it's just impossible to write everything down.' No, the next line in John tracks better with Koheleth's ending. It's truer to John's intent: 'These things have been written; they are sufficient. More information is not needed to convey what God wants to convey in the record provided about his Son. All has been heard. Fear God and keep the commandments of his Son.' I think John here rhymes with Ecclesiastes. So much for beginning and ending. But what about the middle? What about a larger design? I think you can ask this about a number of books. Job comes to mind: why are there three rounds of comforters oddly enough? And all the efforts to try to describe the contents of Ecclesiastes—and your professors will know that well—you open a commentary, there's a little thing there telling you part one, part two, and so forth. The one thing everybody agrees about is that there is a marked middle located at chapter 6. The rabbis counted the verses, and sometimes the middle is quite significant. It's true in the Book of the Twelve; I think it's true clearly here. The refrains in the first part of the book before 6:9 have to do with 'hevel' and 'chasing after wind'; they only appear here, and they cease after that. It's as though Koheleth gets tired of chasing the wind and sees the pointlessness of it, as it were. The book structure says by implication this. So what replaces this in part two? Questions: 'Who knows? One cannot know.' This is a sobered search for a different species of wisdom. I think it can't be accidental too that there are collections of proverbs in chapters 10 and 11 at the end. It's as though he's learned how to use the proverb form now. Two interpreters, Boonvad and Christensen, have concluded from this design fact that the effect is intentionally built into the book. Ecclesiastes presents a loosely organized rumination because Koheleth is running up against the limits of his faculties. He's got an epistemological block, to quote Craig Bartholomew. He's trying to find his sea legs, as it were. Striving after wind is what it means to be searching for something you cannot and are not meant to grasp. Eventually, the wind blows itself out. You kind of wonder here whether they're playing on the wind motif at the beginning of the book, which doesn't do this; it doesn't blow itself out. The tone of part two is more questioning in character: 'Who knows? Who knows?' This is almost a theme or motto. Koheleth is less sure-footed in his anger and indignation. This has been taken to align with part one in the sense that it's just another form of despair, but I don't think this is correct. It doesn't explain why there's a change. Again, one feature that has been insufficiently appreciated is the presence of the wisdom form. When you go home today, go look at chapters 10 and 11—and I'm going to come to 11 here in a minute—there is a kind of wisdom, but it's a sober now kind of wisdom. The world cannot figure it out. 'What is crooked cannot be made straight.' That's not an indictment of the good God; it's paying tribute to created realities that cannot be figured out. There are crooked and broken things one can observe in nature, certain curiosities beyond human comprehension. I think this is going on in the divine speeches as well to Job. He shows Job things he can't understand. As an aside, when I taught at St. Andrews, we shared a courtyard with the Psychology School, and its most prominent professor has spent his entire life studying bird songs. Why do birds sing? Theory after theory has been proposed, and he was the expert. His conclusion: 'We do not know.' That did not depress him or make him any less the expert; it did make him wise. And I'm not sure it's been sufficiently noted how this tone of advanced wisdom, let's call it, lines up with the book of Job. I think the same thing is happening there. That is, Job begins to shoot back against the friends' wisdom with his own in round three; they fizzle out. Job is treated to a divine display of created mystery, animals out beyond human organization and domestication, that signals to him he is truly in the presence of the God who created animals before he created you and me. There's a further structural feature: the so-called joy refrains. Let's stay with these for a minute. These are often viewed as a way to kind of salvage Koheleth, as it were. It is notable there are these refrains; there are eight of them, and they span both parts of the book. They are, I think, a sort of baseline—that's maybe not the right image for a joy refrain. They're a drumbeat, let's call it. This is not to say they drown out the harder music, the minor notes; they definitely do not. But neither can they be called 'carpe diem.' That's Tremper Longman's favorite phrase. That's a terrible idea. 'Carpe diem' is a very dark account of things, belonging to Stoicism just to the degree it has no enduring hope in God's created goodness or plan. Koheleth is not turning to the bottle to numb out life or indulging in cheap despair, a middle finger to the sky. The reason the drumbeat continues is not to offset this and that dark utterance but consists in its total effect over the span of the book. Here an important point needs to be made about Ecclesiastes' peculiar form of discourse. I mentioned it's a kind of ruminating; it seems to be like waves lapping on a shore. It's closer in form to Lamentations or the Song of Songs, lacking some sort of distinct narrative purpose. It's a single brooding consciousness, and brooding does not lend itself to weights and measurements. A quantitative approach to reading the book—how much joy, how much darkness—this won't do, this won't do. To Koheleth, measuring the thickness of its despair or contradictory notes as against combination commendations to enjoy something is going on that requires patience to understand. It's like being at the bed of a dying soul. The incoherence in the back and forth resists tidy evaluation. What one does not want to do is dismiss the commendations to joy and life when suddenly they burst on the scene as simply outweighed by the sum of the struggle and therefore as incongruous outbursts grasping at straws. Perhaps too much has been made. Library has this account of they're getting bigger as we go along: 'Koheleth, Preacher of Joy'—that was his article. This may be an attempt to say a little too much. I think 'Confessions of a Workaholic'—that was another title that was tried out; it's a little better, I think. I think there is some sort of detoxing that's beginning to gain ground in the book, but they're surely more honest about a distinct theme in reality than taking them as numbing agents or 'carpe diem.' In this vein, I think it's critical to observe the location and size of the final one. Here are three, four, and five, and then I'm going to get to the end. You see they seem like they're getting bigger. They are great, by the way. Oh, life is a gift, you know? I mean, they are really—when you read the book, you're happy to have these, I mean there's no doubt about it. And some of them are really great, you know: 'Wisdom is a gift; you got to receive things as gifts; you got to appreciate things in their time.' That's like chapter 3, right? 'Everything has its time; there's a time to hold and a time to let go,' and so forth. So they are just brilliant. I mean, the book is—I got four graduate students working on Koheleth, and they're from all parts of the world, and so forth. I think, 'Why do you want to do this?' The book is super. I just want to tell you that. I like when I teach it; sometimes I start crying at the end, you know? It's just so rich. In this vein, I think it's critical to observe the location and size of the final one, which I'm going to look at here as we come to the end. Toward the end, the word 'hevel' appears heavily, heavily just before the epilogue, and I think it's important to be sure again that the translation does not overdetermine the meaning. 'Hevel' is the theme word of the book as a whole. Gregory of Nyssa, I think, observed—I like this idea—that it is a word that doesn't have any referentiality; that is, its utterance itself has no direct semantic meaning. It's like vapor incarnated by the air moving in the uttering of the phoneme 'hevel.' If one wants a semantic equivalent, I think you have to think of it against this conceptual backdrop. 'Hevel' is 'here and gone tomorrow.' 'Hevel' is 'chasing after wind.' 'Hevel' is 'you can't take it with you.' If I produced a translation, I might translate it that way: 'You can't take it with you.' There's no U-Haul on the back of the hearse, you know? It's ungraspable. The final appeal to joy is longer, and I'm going to read a bit of it because I like reading it; it's just so good. It's a speech act, I think, that underscores the intention of the book as a whole. I'm going to read the verses, and they introduce the final joy refrain. On previous occasions, the fact that the joy refrains sit a little uneasily in their immediate context has been grounds for regarding them as disjunctive, as mitigations, as 'seize the day' qualifications of an otherwise somber discourse. The final refrain, however, is embedded in its context; it's continuous with it; it's consistent with the tone of the verses that precede. I think that's worth noting. I wouldn't mind writing something about that. Koheleth is about to say goodbye to us, and these words are weighty given their position at the end of the book. 'Cast your bread upon the waters, for you will find it after many days. Give a portion to seven or even to eight, for you do not know what evil may happen on earth. If the clouds are full of rain, they empty themselves on the earth. If a tree falls to the south or the north, in the place where the tree falls, there it will lie. He who observes the wind will fail to sow, and he who regards the clouds will never reap. You do not know how the spirit comes to the bones in the womb of a woman with child; so you do not know the work of God who makes everything. In the morning sow your seed, and in the evening withhold not your hand, for you do not know which will prosper, this or that, or whether both alike will be good.' I think the tone here is 'let go.' Mystery is built in. Creation has patterns we cannot fathom, and that's good. Not knowing is not a state of affairs to be overcome but a reality built into our lives. Koheleth has come a long way to get to this point, as we heard and as we've been talking. Chapter 12 is a kind of deathbed goodbye, and just before we have this lead into them, it's the last joy refrain, and I think it's consistent with the verses I just read. 'Light is sweet, and it's pleasant for the eyes to behold the sun. For if a man lives many years, let him rejoice in them all, but let him remember that the days of darkness will be many. All that comes is beyond control. Hevel hevalim. Rejoice, O young man, in your youth, and let your heart cheer you in the days of your youth. Walk in the ways of your heart and in the sight of your eyes, but know that for all these things God will bring you into his all-seeing judgment. Remove vexation from your mind and put away pain from your body, for youth and the dawn of life are hevel; they are for their time, not forever.' And when the funeral scene is completed in chapter 12, we have the epilogue, and it rightly commends Koheleth. The theme of final judgment, which we hear in the last verses, is not foreign to the body of the work; I just read it inside a joy refrain. And with it, the book draws to a close. We've heard the beginning and ending of wisdom. All has been heard. The grammar of strong and weak verbs and the most difficult constructions all has now been set forth, and God has the last word. So let us let him have it: 'Fear God, keep his commandments. This is what it means to be alive; this is the whole duty. For God will bring every deed into judgment, with every secret thing, whether good or evil.' Thank you for your patience.

Good question. You've picked up the fact that I regard the epilogue of the book as trying to secure the hearing of Ecclesiastes in the context of Proverbs. There's a beginning of wisdom; there's an end of wisdom. These are not cantankerous; they're not stages of despair. They're weak verbs and strong verbs; it's that kind of relationship. Solomon—I think the Solomon that the author has in view is the Solomon of 1 Kings 3-11. I don't think he's the Solomon of Chronicles; that's been tried. Chronicles is basically the Solomon of 1 Kings. I think they had their eye on his accumulation. They also had their eye on chapter 11, where that's a very harsh—it's only five or six verses, but it's very clear: he built statues to Milcom and so forth. Something went wrong. And I think the Targum to Koheleth, which I read yesterday, is right on track. I think they're picking up that he lost his name, as it were; he wandered around. Some of them say the devil got a hold of him, Ashmedai or something, and they hounded him, and he lost his name. I think that's right. I also think chapter 8 is crucial. Chapter 8 is an unusual chapter in the narrative because it's Solomon's prayer. Take a look at that; that's where 'kahal' appears over and over again. I think that's where the idea came from. I've argued that, whether it's true or not I don't know, because in that passage, what is happening is Solomon is given the ability to see way beyond his own frame of reference. And what does he see? He sees the failure of things. Now Jenny Barbour has argued this; I think she's right on that point, that Koheleth—although she doesn't treat it in the same way I would—Koheleth is able to see way into the future. He's praying about what's going to happen when everything breaks, when everything is overrun. There's a lot going on in that: that God has called David and he's set up Solomon, but somehow Solomon is already privy to the fact that this is going to be a gift of God that's not going to work out. So I think there's a lot going on in that. In a way, she makes a big deal out of that; she wants Koheleth to be every king that ever lived, and she tries to find ways to do that. Well, since most of the kings were a disaster, it's not hard to line them up, you know? I mean, that's not difficult. But you look in the index of her book, and she doesn't really account for very much of the book of Ecclesiastes; you just said three or four places where the thing—I won't get off into that. But a graduate student I have just finished a dissertation on that, and that's also where the Adamic part of Koheleth is important, because Adam is a tragic figure, but he's clothed. There's something that's happening that God is allowing the thing to continue in mercy.

I think that's it. And I think it's all the more true. There is a way in which the last chapter is true: 'Beware of...' you know, I preached on this. 'Pay attention, my son.' There is this kind of way in which those commendations have force because the person has failed himself, and he's come to realize something about the beauty of things in their own time. That's where chapter 3 is so critical. And so he wants to command something to us to take away: remember life is short; you will die one day. Therefore, try to pay attention; number your days, as the psalmist would say. Try to pay attention; try to be grateful. I mean, that's the thing about gift. You would think it'd be an easy thing to do, but you have to discipline yourself. I used to go to these Nigerian churches in Dallas, and they had this whole thing where they spent an hour talking about the things that God had done for them that week. I thought, 'Gee, I've never done that.' That sounds like—but it's a discipline. You have to sit down and think. My wife and I, we think, 'How was the week? Well, I got to meet Gignilliat's kids again,' and stuff. You have to learn how to pay attention to things in their own time and take them as gifts. There's nothing wrong with accumulating great things. The narratives of Kings don't really ever put him down for this. As a matter of fact, the gaining of wisdom brings Sheba to his court. Calvin thought that was great; he was making converts and so forth. He thought the wives was a great idea. But at the end, something got away from him.

Oh yeah, and it's just fascinating. And then this and the—and you return to the Creator who gave you breath. I mean, there's a lot of Genesis in the book. There's probably a lot more there. Len Finn, who's just finished the dissertation with me, has found a lot of that. The article I refer to—you may know it; it's only two pages long—on the Garden of Eden and so forth. So it's a Scandinavian guy, and I thought as soon as I read it, 'Oh, that's—I mean, that particularly the royal experiment is perfect: 'And he saw that it was hevel.' But your doubt, I think it's doubtless the case. He makes a big deal out of the Adamic character of Koheleth as well. So you got to get the king and the Adam working together, and it's not hard to do. There are reasons why that will work, but you're right. I gave a version of this—not this paper—but I published a piece in a volume that Trinity Western published on the canonical reading of Ecclesiastes. I read the paper at a conference in Paris, and Thomas Römer was there. You know how he is; it's like he's got to figure out who knows what and what do they know and all that. I said, 'I don't operate that way. It seems to me that you don't have to make sure you know the date of Ecclesiastes to know whether he knew P and all that kind of thing. It seems to me that if you've got intertextuality, you need to go ahead and say that there's something going on there.' I often think too those games run afoul of the fact that often these directions are going both ways; they're not just—it's not just this guy's using that guy or something like that. I think there's sometimes mutual influencing.

I think that's why the book is so popular with my students, my younger students. I think they see that. I think Job is a go-to text here too. I think the point of the divine speeches is that Job is treated to God's view of the way things look, and that's not something you say—you don't say, 'Hey Job, this is why you're suffering.' You don't give an answer to that. You overwhelm Job with God, and Job walks away and says, 'I'm in the presence of God; that has reframed everything.' That's not tongue-in-cheek. 'I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you.' He's telling—he said that's what happened. But when God does that, what does he do? He shows them the world; he shows them whales and terrifying beasts and so forth. This is just genius. I've got dogs, and I love animals, so I think in this frame of reference. But yeah, you could do—I think you do a lot with this: enjoy life on its proper terms. And boy, do we need that, particularly in a wealthy context in which we live. We just have too many things. COVID could have been a real gift, and you know, maybe it is—as much as we hate it, it's kind of helped us strip back to try to think about the things that really matter. Or we could run off in despair, and that's the kind of balancing act I think Koheleth is wrestling with. I got some choices here. Maybe it's no bad thing to be broken. You know, my men could start to learn some things. I never learned anything except through pain. But other people—you got to run to the end of yourself, and so yeah.

Oh, it's a really great question, and it really takes—you know, this is why I read Tremper Longman's commentary and say, 'You know, just don't open that book.' You can solve the problem of Koheleth by just simply saying, 'This is what the world's like without Christ,' and that's just never the way the tradition heard the book. They tended to hear the book as an account of what the world is like that Christ came and entered, and in that way, the incarnation is a penetration to the heart of Koheleth's struggle. But I don't have any answer to your question because I think there's something deep going on there about why it is that people can't tolerate limit and sternness and so forth. I don't know how to answer the question. If I'm hearing it right, I agree with you: it's an easy book to dismiss by introducing a different register, and I just think this is not right. There are deep mysteries in the book, and I don't know what it is. 'The sayings of the wise are like goads.' I mean, there it is. And why is it that I find the book so great? Maybe I'm ill, you know? But there's a lot of ink spilled on the book. There are psychoanalysts who've written brilliant treatments of Koheleth. It's like sitting on the couch every day, going in day after day after day, and the therapist says, 'What's going on?' You know, I know what you're talking about. Some people just don't—this is scary. They'd rather say, 'I'm classifying this guy as a nut,' or 'It's just despair.' But it's not that. The book doesn't go there. You have ancient Near Eastern examples of despair if you want to start comparing things.