28 January 2004 22:49
Ecclesiastes: although this might not mean anything...my study bible breaks it down like this:
personal experience ch 1-2
general observations ch 3-5
practical counsel ch 6-8
final conclusion ch 9-12
you can sum the first two chapters up with, "if nothing's permanent, why bother?"
2.2: "laughter is foolish". ignore this guy, he's in a bad mood
2.9: read vv4-9, then look at 9b. "In all this my wisdom stayed with me." so wisdom is a curse? how ironic. to me, he's saying that because he's wise, he see's through everything and is unable to enjoy it. reinforces the phrase "ignorance is bliss."
of all the books in the bible, ecc is the one that i could have written, it's my kind of style. start out with vague descriptions or random connections, add some rhetorical questions, make hyperbolic statements, argue the opposite, make sarcastic comments, treat everything cynically, then founder in depression for a little while. but then my conscience gets the better of me, i figure out what the solution(s) is/are, and i end up with a positive view along the lines of "God know's what he's doing."
2.10-16: the teacher is ignoring the afterlife here.. i wonder if he was truly ignorant of what will happen, or if he was just making a point. my vote is for the latter. first he was one of the wisest guys around, second he speaks of judgement at the end (12.14). but if you know that the wise will go to heaven and the foolish to hell, this whole diatribe about "the same fate overtaking them both (2.14)" crumbles quickly.
2.17-23: Orson Scott Card wrote a short story that I read in this collection entitled "Mortal Gods". in it aliens come to earth to worship humans. the aliens are immortal, and they are able exchange memory, so their offspring are fully aware of their entire history from birth. they came to worship humans because humans die, because humans are an aberration, all life in the universe has evolved like these aliens with mindnumbing repetition. if they were to build soemthing, they would live to see it crumble. with memory of their entire history, they are unable to imagine anything new and so create art. humans though, depsite their incredibly short lifespan, they create monuments, they paint art, and above all they glorify death. death is an "ending". humans place a beginning and an end to everything. they border their paintings with a frame instead of continuing them, they write poems and songs about death, and their poems have endings. sure, they try to delay it as far as possible, but they still glorify it as the end-all be-all for mankind. so the aliens came to worship those who could die.
the old man they intereacted with in the story didn't grasp this concept very well. he would have agreed with the teacher in vv17-23
2.24: "A man can do nothing better than to eat and drink and find satisfaction in his work." so is this a final statement? or is the teacher just making a point? after all, in this chapter he's called laughter foolish (v2), wisdom meaningless (v15), and just spent a long paragraph (vv17-23) waxing ill about how much he hated life. then segues from "this too is meaningless" to "a man can do nothing better" without batting an eye. i'll write like this too, because i'll finish a paragraph and then have the luxury of thinking logically through a chain of thoughts for a couple minutes before i get around to starting the second paragraph. the reader however, is not so fortunate, it's like watching a train enter a tunnel and then seeing it come out on the other side with seventeen new cars that i picked up inside the tunnel.
but if we ref the rest of the book, we see this statement is final, even though v26c says otherwise (yet another "this too is meaningless..."). the first three of the four sections mentioned at the start finish with a similar statement. 2.24, 5.18 "...it is good and proper for a man to eat and drink, and to find satisfaction in his labor..., 8.15 says "So I commend the enjoyment of life...eat drink and be glad.". the last section concludes differently, but contains similarities (namely, in refuting the "everything is meaningless concept"), but i'll talk about that at the end.
3.14: "Everything God does will endure forever...God does this so that men will revere him". compare that to the OSC story for 2.17-23.
3.21: "Who knows if the spirit of man rises upward?" back to 2.10-16, it still seems like the teacher doesn't know what's going to happen to him after death. which would help explain his out look on life..
5.20: here's a utopian scene.. the teacher has just concluded the section with "it is good to eat and drink and find satisfaction". then "[man] seldom reflects on the days of his life, because God keeps him occupied with gladness of heart." almost enough to make a person feel guilty for complaining about how hard things are.
7.1: "and the day of death [is] better than the day of birth." my study bible says "we are to enjoy what we have while we can, but adversity reminds us that life is short." unfortunately, it's hard to judge how literally to take the teacher's statement here, he says in v3 that "a sad face is good for the heart." one gets the impression he's being more than a little perverse. birth is a celebration of life, a very happy day in its own right, and then we celebrate that life every year of its life. death tends to get very depressing, despite the happy prospects for the christain who dies. by all rights a funeral should be a joyous celebration of the birth of the dead person into the kingdom --a very much happier occasion than a birth here on earth. like marriage is a pale shadow of our union with God, earthly birth is but a pale shadow of our birth into God's family in heaven. on this note, the teacher is very correct in verse one. verse three on the other hand...i can't rationalize that one at all.
7.10: ha! i say this all the time, "they don't make them like they used to," and "back in the good old days." 20/20 on Jan 23 aired a piece by John Stossel on modern myths in America. his number one myth was "life was better in the good old days." he interviewed a few of the elderly who were adamant in declaring that things are better today than they were half a century ago. modern medicine, technology, emissions reductions, he even went swimming in the hudson river to prove that it's clean enough nowadays to swim in legally. but the teacher takes the gandalf approach, a mystic, ominous harbringer of doom "For it is not wise to ask such questions."
7.12: "money is a shelter." --food for thought eh?
7.18: "The man who fears God will avoid all extremes." dunno.. that sounds like an extreme statement to me. "never say never" and all that. it seems to me that when it comes to something like being a Jesus freak, extreme is the only way to go.
7.21-22: i should probably start wearing ear plugs then.
8.11: get this. "When the sentence for a crime is not quickly carried out, the hearts of the people are filled with schemes to do wrong." well well now, if we don't have the US justice system in a nutshell.
10.6: the teacher was bemoaning the evil way things were going... "Fools are put in many high positions, / while the ____ occupy the low ones." what goes in the blank? it's wise, right? no, it's actually the rich. having been raised on staples such as luke 1.53 (he has filled the hungry with good things / but has sent the rich away empty), i've come to always associate wealth with the world and sin (there's a mennonite upbringing for you, even though many are wealthy) and to associate poorness with contendedness and being closer to God. part of that's just my idealistic-anti-materialistic bent. but having the rich put in low positions decried set me back a bit. it helped me realize how much the teacher viewed wealth as evidence of a person being blessed by God becuase of their righteousness. he implies that the righteous by definition will be rich. i agree with that, but my tendency is to think they will be spiritually rich, the teacher's tendency is to think they will be materialistically rich. i'm probably depriving myself of a lot of material blessings that i could be enjoying right now. hmm...
12.13-14: we slip back into second person narrative to deliever the finale, "the conclusion of the matter."
Fear God and keep his commandments,
for this is the whole duty of man.
For God will bring every deed into judgement,
including every hidden thing,
whether it is good or evil.
"What is the chief end of man?"
"Man's chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him for ever." --Westminster Shorter Catechism, 1647
so if we fear God and keep his commandments, doesn't that bring glory to God? at any rate, i digress.
at the endings to the first three quarters, the teacher said it was good for man to eat, drink, and find satisfaction in his work. he changes his tune a little too. personally, my unscholarly opinion is that the "teacher" had nothing to do with writing ecc1.1 and ecc12.9-14. it's like the worship leader at church encapsulating the sermon. i never quite got why they do that, unless it makes them feel like they're actually up there for a reason. but my vote is that the writer of ecc felt the teacher hadn't quite made his point strongly enough, so he laid it on thick with verses 13 and 14. not that i disapprove, it is good to know what my duty is. but they don't have a whole lot to do with his earlier sub-conclusions, that is, enjoy life while it's here.
people talk about this book being depressing and all that. i don't find it so. i read through it this morning and spent more time laughing than crying. read 5.2, 7.10, 7.23-24, and 10.19. those got smiles out of me..
5.2: God is in heaven / and you are on earth / so let your words be few.
7.23: "i am determined to be wise" -- / but this was beyond me.
7.24: whatever wisdom may be, / it is far off and most profound -- / who can discover it?
10.19: A feast is made for laughter, / and wine makes life merry, / but money is the answer for everything.
when i think of Ecclesiastes, i honestly consider it a light work, fully of witty sarcasm. sure it's dark in a few spots, but he always points to the truth, to God. from his position of wisdom, he sees things the way they are. he know's this, and i know this. everything is Not meaningless. he know's this, and i know this. that immediately makes the entire pretense of despair non-literal. it's a dark comedy that contains many truths. now i'm the one who's going to be burned as a heretic.
but personally (again), the last five verses put a damper on the whole book, they get all serious and everything. ighh.
0128044.1505-1941
22:49 email me permalink / commentary (0)
