Reading: Ecclesiastes 5-8, Psalm 9

We continue today in the book of Ecclesiastes, a cheery book full of the pleasant musings of a wise and successful king. What? It doesn’t seem so cheery? You don’t find joy in the Teacher’s advice? Well, let’s look at what he is advising today. Having exhausted materialism in yesterday’s reading, he turns to religious practice today- go to the Temple, worship rightly, fulfill your vows. After all, why should God be angry at your voice and destroy the work of your hands? Then he talk about wealth, poverty, and matters of what we would today call social justice. Don’t worry overmuch about exploitation and injustice, he says, because keeping the fields cultivated is good for everyone. It is better to be poor anyway, because sweet is the sleep of the laborer, whether he eats little or much, but the full stomach of the rich man will not let him sleep. He observes that those who acquire great wealth, power, and status don’t get to enjoy it. They may pass it to their children, or lose it all during their lives, but in the end do not all go to the same place? Everyone dies, and nobody knows what happens after their lives end. Then he goes into a poem about how funerals are better than birthdays, and how being stillborn is better than living a long full life.

Okay, you’re right. Less than cheery.

So what is the deal here? This all seems very depressing. What is helpful about the Teacher’s musings? What do we get out of Be not overly righteous, and do not make yourself too wise… be not overly wicked, neither be a fool. Should we be just a little bit wicked, but not too much? Ecclesiastes really brings out the issues with chapter and verse proof texting in the Bible. I mean, tomorrow we will read that Bread is for feasting, and wine makes life merry, but money is the answer for everything. I’m guessing (hoping) nobody has got a Sunday School lesson on that little gem. Or maybe while seeking and not finding, I found but one righteous man in a thousand, but not one righteous woman among them all. Kind of rough. Then we remember this is Solomon, man of 1000 wives, and it all makes sense.

More seriously, let’s look at what appears to be the Teacher’s conclusion after his observation of life’s pursuits: I commend joy, for a man has nothing better under the sun but to eat and drink and be joyful, for this will go with him in his toil through the days of his life that God has given him under the sun. The Teacher has reached an individualist utilitarian emotivist conclusion (enjoy using that in conversation). Pursue the most happiness you can during your life, cause that is all you get. Be good enough, avoid being overly bad, but most of all be happy. It is of unending fascination to me that the postmodern conclusion was reached by an ancient near eastern king three thousand years ago. So is the Teacher really commending living this kind of life? I’m not sure, but given the context of his words, I would be very cautious in following his train of thought very far. I mean, this guy was saying it was better to be stillborn than to live a full life just a couple of pages ago. A page before that he is defending structural injustice based on indigestion. I’m not sure that the happiness he is proposing we pursue is the happiness we really want.

Let’s take a step back from the bitter words of the Teacher, and try and see what this book is trying to do. No matter when this was written down, it is clear by where it is in the canon of Scripture that Ecclesiastes is meant to be read with the full knowledge of the story of Israel going into exile. It is kind of fun to try and place the wisdom books into their chronological place in the story, but ultimately counterproductive, because they were ordered the way they were on purpose, and that ordering comprises the book that formed the Jewish community that the people who wrote the New Testament were a part of. That community was trying to make sense of life after the exile, under foreign rule, as a people dispersed throughout the Babylonian, Persian, Greek, and finally Roman empires. They were interacting with other world views. If you take the time to read them, you will find that some of the ancient philosophers were actually quite advanced and modern in their thinking. Solomon isn’t saying anything here that wasn’t present in Greek and Roman philosophy of the time. There really isn’t anything new under the sun.

Given that context, I think Ecclesiastes is an extensive exploration of the human problem in the context of exile and diaspora. It is a tour of the possible answers to the problem we all ultimately face: everyone dies. The actions and attitudes of life all wind up in the same place. What does a man gain from all his toil at which he toils under the sun? Nobody has a good answer. We live, we die. What does it all mean? Not having an answer is the essance of the human problem. Humanity declared independence from God, and now we have to figure it out. But we can’t. Ecclesiastes is a showcase of how we have failed in our independence project.