Life, Death, and the Futility of Everything: Part 2

Hey All,

Today we begin our trip through Ecclesiastes. We’re looking at Ecclesiastes in order to understand what we can expect from a life lived in the world between Genesis 1 and Revelation 21. Last week we laid out the “where” and the “why” of this trip. Let’s now look at the “who” and the “how” of this journey and end with the Teacher’s opening salvo.

We are introduced to the writer of Ecclesiastes in verse 1: “The words of the Teacher, son of David, king in Jerusalem” Like all of Ecclesiastes this is misleading and slippery. Traditionally Ecclesiastes has been attributed to Solomon. Almost all scholars agree today that the writer of Ecclesiastes was most definitely not Solomon. The writer is indentified as “The Teacher” which in Hebrew is Qoheleth and it means collector of sentences, teacher, and speaker to an assembly. Qoheleth has a bit in common with Shakespeare in that no one can prove definitively that he ever existed and his works, in some circles, are considered to be the efforts of a group rather than a lone human being.

In 1898 C.G. Siegfried put forth the idea that as many as five writers were represented in Ecclesiastes. One of the reasons for this approach is that Ecclesiastes seemingly contradicts itself. In one section Qoheleth states that he hates life (2:17) and yet it another it is apparently better to be a live dog than a dead lion (9:4). There is no unanimous agreement for Ecclesiastes authorship. What is clear is that there are at least two folk's contributions in the book. The bulk of Ecclesiastes is written in the first person by Qoheleth which covers Chapters 1-12:8 while 12:9-14 are an epilogue written by another author. For our purposes here we’ll go with Qoheleth as the identifier of the writer of Ecclesiastes and the writer of the epilogue as a father or mentor reading Ecclesiastes to his son or mentee (12:12).

If Ecclesiastes wasn’t written by Solomon then why bring Solomon up at all? It’s important to first acknowledge that writers of antiquity played a lot faster and looser with “facts” than we do today. Well…some folks from today still play pretty fast and loose with facts. Anyway writers would write under pseudonyms of famous individuals to invoke images, emphasize authority, or to acknowledge a source for what they were writing. The reason Qoheleth conjures up the image of Solomon in the minds of his readers is to create a context for what he’s about to write. Solomon was considered the wisest man to ever live (1 Kings 3) and yet his reign ended in disgrace (1 Kings 11:9-13). If anyone would know the highest of highs and lowest of lows that this futile life has to offer it would be Solomon. So it is Solomon that serves as the window dressing for Qoheleth’s worldview. In my mind the voice of Qoheleth is that of Tom Waits: God's world weary carnival barker. Mr. Waits has never been one to shy away from the futility of life:

Let’s now turn to how Qoheleth approaches Ecclesiastes.  The Jewish understanding of the world at the time had three distinct realms: the heavenly realms inhabited by God and the angels, Sheol the realm of the dead, and the world “under the sun,” the land of the living, Earth. Qoheleth is exclusively interested in creation as it stands “under the sun.” This exclusivity limits our perception of the world to see how it stands independent of the heavenly realms or Sheol.  Those realms are mentioned only from the perspective of one who remains firmly under the sun. Qoheleth has looked at the world and attempted to discern some rational sense evident in the workings of the world through purely human eyes. The search has proven futile. The various pursuits this life has to offer, when viewed as an end unto themselves, are meaningless and fleeting. Take it Q!

 ² “Meaningless! Meaningless!”
   says the Teacher.
“Utterly meaningless!
   Everything is meaningless.”
 ³ What do people gain from all their labors
   at which they toil under the sun?
⁴ Generations come and generations go,
   but the earth remains forever.
⁵ The sun rises and the sun sets,
   and hurries back to where it rises.
⁶ The wind blows to the south
   and turns to the north;
round and round it goes,
   ever returning on its course.
⁷ All streams flow into the sea,
   yet the sea is never full.
To the place the streams come from,
   there they return again.
⁸ All things are wearisome,
   more than one can say.
The eye never has enough of seeing,
   nor the ear its fill of hearing.
⁹ What has been will be again,
   what has been done will be done again;
   there is nothing new under the sun.
¹⁰ Is there anything of which one can say,
   “Look! This is something new”?
It was here already, long ago;
   it was here before our time.
¹¹ No one remembers the former generations,
   and even those yet to come
will not be remembered
   by those who follow them.

Not exactly the St. Crispin Day Speech is it? You can almost hear the world inhale and exhale with each line. The sun rises and the sun sets. The wind blows south and back around north again. It has gone on long before we got here it’ll probably go on long after we’re gone. Nations rise and crumble. Scenes thrive and die. Roses bloom and wither. Cornel West is fond of saying, “we’re beings towards death, we’re featherless two-legged linguistically conscious creatures born between urine and feces whose bodies will one day be the culinary delight of terrestrial worms” (Cornel West on Truth). Life begins with a violent push, a burst of light, and a smack on the butt, which is followed by a long low crawl through hostile territory, and ends as we, alone once more, fall exhausted into our graves. The world will barely notice our passing. No one is remembered. Even for the ones who get remembered for a time it must be asked; is it them who is remembered or is it a spectre of them that is distorted by the grime of humanity and time that is remembered more than the actual individual ever could be? Yes we’re all unique snowflakes. However, in the unrelenting blizzard of time we all pretty much look the same.

With the 1^st eleven verses Qoheleth firmly establishes that this life is hebel; a breath that is soon forgotten. The logical response to this is despair. Yet I believe that we must stare this cruel fact in the face and come to a place of acceptance with it. As we established last week this life we have is a breath preceded and followed by billions of other breaths. Nevertheless it is the only breath we’ll ever get and so what we do on our journey from crib to crypt matters a great deal. The great lesson to learn while we live is how to die.

We learn to die by examining the life we’ve lived in order to better direct the life we’ve got left. To comprehend our strengths, acknowledge our weaknesses, explore our dreams, come to grips with our nightmares, identify our defects, and polish our skills. To fully embrace our fleeting life is to accept uncertainty as the reality in which we live. During our time here under the sun we probably will not capital “K” Know anything. By that I mean humans are limited creations with the spark of the infinite. We know there is more to creation than we can ever possibly know. Learning to die is accepting our inability to fully comprehend anything. What we will see as we move forward with Qoheleth is that we are not in a place to discern what a fully worthwhile endeavor is. Once this is accepted we can then begin to live a life with a proper perspective free from the obsessions, fixations, cravings and addictions that so desperately want to drag us down. 1^st up will be wisdom. Until then, as all ways…

Have a good one,

Carl