Emptiness or Inevitability?

(Lectionary for January 1, 2017)

Though there are two other optional texts suggested for this first day of the calendar, this year on a Sunday, I choose to focus on the famous (infamous?) passage from the odd book of Ecclesiastes. This text regularly is chosen for the first day of a new year, and I confess I am never sure quite why. Just what is interesting/attractive/engaging/worthwhile about Ecc.3 at the beginning of a year? I admit to being at least partially baffled.

Because I am 70 years old, I well remember when the American folk/rock band, The Byrds, had a huge hit with a song largely based on this text in 1965. They were covering a song written by legendary folk singer, Pete Singer, who composed it in the late 1950’s. Before the Bryd’s success, the song was included on an album by The Limeliters , a very popular folk group of the period, in 1962. Seeger intended his song to be a musical call for peace. He included the first eight verses of Ecc.3 but added “Turn, Turn, Turn” after Ecc.3:8, an apparent call for repentance from war making, as well as the line “I swear it’s not too late.” As the Vietnam War escalated in the mid-60’s, the Byrds rode the wave of anti-war sentiment and scored a hit. Many singers have sung the song since that time and right up to the present day.

But the author of Ecclesiastes was not writing an anti-war ballad. Exactly what he was writing has been the source of great scholarly controversy. But first a few preliminary comments are in order. The author is unknown, though the fiction of the writer is that it was composed by Solomon, son of David, who was in the later years of Israel lionized for his supposed great wisdom. However, since there are several obvious Persian words in the book (see pardes, “park” at Ecc.2:5—whence comes English “paradise”– and medina “province” at Ecc. 2:8), Solomon, the 10th century BCE king of Israel could not be the author, unless he wrote a language that did not exist anywhere in his time! Also, we know the book by the Greek title, Ecclesiastes, though the Hebrew is Koheleth. That name is based apparently on the noun for “assembly,” so Martin Luther translated it “Der Prediger” in his German reading in the 16th century, or “The Preacher” in English. It appears to mean “leader of an assembly,” perhaps a teacher, but we cannot be certain definitively.

The time of the composition is also in dispute, but it has to be after the Persian empire became dominant in the Near East—late 6th century BCE—and, given the heavy influence of Aramaic on the Hebrew of the book, possibly as late as the 4th or 3rd century. But again definitive answers are elusive.

But by far the more important question is: what was the author saying in the composition? If one is willing to read beyond the famous poem that ends in 3:8, perhaps a modicum of insight might be gained.

The poem seems clear enough. It begins “For everything there is a time, an occasion for every business under the sky” (Ko 3:1). Then the poet continues to list that business in a contrasting cascade of activities that all have experienced: birth and death, planting and reaping, killing and healing, smashing and building, weeping and laughing, mourning and dancing, stone throwing and stone gathering, hugging and avoidance, seeking and losing, keeping and throwing away, ripping and sewing, being silent and speaking, loving and hating, war and peace. Well, who in the world could argue with that? All of these things are things that happen, and they happen at various times that any person could name, depending on where they have observed them. In fact, Koheleth implies that all of these actions occur all of the time and everywhere. So, just what are we to learn from this catalogue? This is the world we know, but how are we to apprise what

 that world’s description means for us? We must read on, despite that ubiquitous song we of a certain age are all now singing in our heads!

At 3:9 Koheleth writes a line he uses at several other places in his book: “What gain (or “profit”) does the doer receive for his trouble?” Koheleth is nothing less than obsessed with the search for purpose and meaning in human activity. What is the point, he asks? If the world is as the poem describes, a this and a that in an endless round, then what do we get from it all; just why should we toil at all? His answer, if it can be said to be an answer, is found at Ko 3:10-11.

“I have seen the task that God has given to humanity to be busy with; God has made everything appropriate for its time. Furthermore, God has placed ‘olam in their hearts in such a way that no human can find the action that God has done from first to last.”

I find this a most troubling notion, and that for several reasons. Koheleth first offers no answer to our question; he merely reiterates what the poem told us about our world. God has made it just like that; there is planting and reaping and war and peace, etc. That is just how it is. The world is as it is, because God made it so. But he then adds a line that is nothing less than haunting to those of us who would like some answers to our greatest questions. God has planted ‘olam into us, he says. The translation of the Hebrew ‘olam is very contentious. The NRSV reads “a sense of past and future” which I find intriguing and not wrong. My old Brown, Driver, Briggs Hebrew lexicon suggests “long duration” or “antiquity” or “futurity.” As you can surmise from the wide range of these suggestions, the word is slippery. It is certainly a word having to do with time. “Eternity” is not correct, I do not think, though many translations have it. It appears to mean here something like the view of time that God possesses, hence the NRSV’s “sense of past and future.”

Yet, though God drops that sense into us, God does it in such a way that no one of us can ever figure out what exactly God has been, is, and will be up to. We all have a very limited taste of the big picture of things, but that tiny taste will never be satisfied. In short, God teases us with real knowledge of the “actions under the sky,” but we can only remain frustrated by a taste of knowledge we may never fully know. Read that way, the poem of Ko 3:1-8 is little more than bare description of a world of which we all will remain finally thoroughly ignorant. That reading might help us understand why Koheleth begins his book as he does, warning us that “all is empty,” and that “generations come and go, but the earth stays constant,” and that “rivers run into the sea but the sea never fills up,” and that “there is nothing new under the sun.” There will always be war and peace and sewing and reaping, and on and on. Life is always the same, and “all things are empty, a feeding on the wind” (Ko 2:11). Little wonder that Pete Seeger added “I swear it’s not too late!” For Koheleth, it appears to be very late indeed.

Well, that is the dark reading of Koheleth, the one that finds in him the ultimate cynical pessimist. Nothing will ever change, and there is precisely nothing you or anyone else can do about it.

However, there may be another reading, one that might offer some reason why we are reading the thing on Jan 1. Life has a solid inevitability about it, says Koheleth; you can find your place in it because it remains constant, fixed, steadfast, firm. Life is not characterized by confusion, by unexpectedness, by horrible surprise. To the contrary, life can be trusted, because God has made it so. For some, such solidity is wearisome; for others it provides calm, ease, assurance.

I confess that I think Koheleth had more of the former in mind than the latter, but one can find in his complex words evidence for both ideas. As we approach a new year, one in which we inaugurate a President Trump (I thought I would never utter such a phrase!) there may be for some of us a terrible cynicism commensurate with a dark reading of Koheleth. But perhaps not. We perhaps may find comfort in the fact that the earth will remain fixed, even in the face of a President Trump, and long after a President Trump has passed from our eyes. And thus a Happy New Year!