Ecclesiastes 1:1-3
a close reading of how the book starts
1:1
diverey Qoheleth
The first words of the book are diverey Qoheleth, “the words of Qoheleth.” While most of the books of the Jewish Bible take their name from the first word of the book, this one takes its name from the second. In Hebrew, the book is Qoheleth (Latinate: Ecclesiastes). The book we call Deuteronomy starts with eleh ha-d’varim, “These are the words” and the book takes the name Devarim.
Given my hypothesis—that there is a meaningful difference between the author of the book and his character, Qoheleth—I understand the author to be saying both that (a) this is another book of words, and (b) they aren’t my words.
Plato wrote a Socrates, and Kierkegaard wrote a Judge William.1 I contend that the anonymous author wrote a Qoheleth, and that the book we have is a narrative. The author is neither simply faithfully representing the ideology of his character, nor using the character as a mouthpiece for his own ideology. In fact, there may be difference between the author’s (narrator’s) interests and his character’s.
Again, because a character speaks contradictory words, does that mean the author is contradicting himself? No. Go read a novel.
(Side note: I don’t know what to do with this yet, but I wonder whether Moses is to Deuteronomy as Qoheleth is to Ecclesiastes. Moses is a qoheleth. Each book is a book of their words, where each one is referred to both in the first and the third person. Hm.)
1:2
Hevel hevelim amar qoheleth
The next section (vv. 2-11) begins with the phrase Hevel hevelim amar qoheleth, or “Breath of breaths, says Qoheleth.” (Lol, that rhymes.) This gives us a theme, Hevel hevelim, and refers to the character from the third person, amar qoheleth.
We know a new section will begins at v. 12 because the author shifts narrative perspectives. He begins to write Qoheleth in the first person, apparently unaware of his having already been introduced by the author at v. 1.
Verse 1: div’rey qoheleth ben-david melek biyrushalem; The words of Qoheleth, son of David, king in Jerusalem.
Verse 12: Ani qoheleth hayiytiy melek’ al-yishrael biyrushalem; I, Qoheleth have been king over Israel in Jerusalem.
So, I’m writing that question down: Why two introductions from two perspectives?
We’re not going to ask source critical questions here (e.g. Is vv. 2-11 a later addition?). Nor are we going to ask ideological questions of the book (e.g. What is the book saying?) Instead, we’re going to stick with a literary question.
Qoheleth’s first word is hevel. Of v. 2’s eight words, five of them are hevel. What does hevel mean?
The LXX has mataios, which basically means “empty,” or “not yielding results.” In the NT, mataios is “futility.”
The Vulgate has vanitas, which is why the KJV has “vanity,” which means more to contemporary readers than it should. It’s not “meaninglessness.”
The Hebrew, hevel, literally means breath.
If you’re looking for canonical resonances (which, of course we are), Hevel is Abel’s Hebrew name. Abel’s brief story is like a vapor, or a breath. Here and then gone. One brief act of worship, which provokes the jealous of his brother (for Qoheleth on masculine rivalry, see Eccl. 4:4).
Taking these two observations together—the literal meaning and its resonance in Torah—you can’t read hevel as “meaninglessness.”
Our breath dies as soon as it’s exhaled, but does that make it meaningless?2 No. Is Abel’s life meaningless? Checkmate.
1:3
If v. 2 poses the first philosophical claim, ha-kol havel, or “all is breath,” then v. 3 poses the first philosophical question: mah-yit’ron la’adam, or “What-profit to-man?” Englishers insert verbs like “does” (“What does a man profit?”) or “has” (“What profit hath man?”).
I prefer to verbify the noun and say, “What is left to/for man?” Or, “What remains for man?”
One way that some evangelicals (e.g., here and here) have dealt with Ecclesiastes is by drawing a distinction between profit (yit’ron, at 1:3; 2:11, 13; 3:9; 5:9, 16; 7:12; 10:10, 11) and reward (cheleq, at 2:10, 21; 3:22; 5:18, 19; 9:6, 9; 11:2). But their conclusions (“There’s No Profit in Work. But There Is a Reward”) are moralizing and spiritualizing sophistry, and the distinction between the terms doesn’t hold up to a close reading.
When the preacher says, “Don’t look to the profit; look to the reward,” how do you actually do that? That sophistry can be Tweeted, but it doesn’t account for the text and it doesn’t explain the real world.
yit’ron, often translated profit, comes from the root yathar which means “to remain over.” Examples in Torah:
Exodus 12:10 and 29:34, of manna, “You shall not leave it over until morning,” but “you shall burn the remainder with fire; it shall not be eaten, because it is holy.” That sets a tone in Torah and the early Prophets. In the cult, you don’t leave leftovers. See the above, as well as the gleaning laws, and the restrictions on peace offerings in Lev. 7. Holy leftovers go one of two places: fire, or the mouth of the priest. Read the conquest narratives in Joshua and yatar describes whatever isn’t fully devoted to the fire or the sword.
Speaking of holy and untouchable leftovers, recall Jacob: “Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him until daybreak” (Gen. 32:24). To be alone, for Jacob, meant to be left over from the rest, and therefore to be dealt with by God. Did God eat him? Did God burn him? I mean, kind of, right? My point is, this picks up the theme of the holy remainder. Speaking of human leftovers, once Aaron’s sons are put to death, his other two sons, Eleazar and Ithamar, who become replacement priests, are called left over.
yatar is used positively at the end of Deuteronomy: “Yahweh will make you abound in prosperity” (28:11; 30:9). He doesn’t, at this point, legislate how to reinvest wealth, but if you’re 96% of the way into Torah and you don’t know what to do with excess wealth… you should go back to the beginning (or the middle) and read it again. This isn’t an endorsement of super-wealth, or of the desire for super-wealth.
So, the question, “What remains for man” was answered back in Torah: For the most part, Israel was to live without a sense of stored up remainder. Manna was daily bread. Any peace offering was a one-day feast. What’s left over is either so holy that it’s for the priests, so ceremonially unclean that it wasn’t for laity, or so necessary that was to be left for the poor.
Can Ecclesiastes 1:3 be read as a critique of consumer capitalism? Yes, just as all of Torah can.
But my reading of this first question is that isn’t not an unanswerable one, and the move isn’t to go to “heavenly reward,” or “meaningfulness” or something. I think it’s rhetorical: Given Torah, what profit or left over is there? Yeah, none. Our worship (Exod., Lev.) symbolizes our labor: No leftovers. In God’s (literal) economy, all corporations are non-profit corporations.
tachat ha-shamesh, or “under the sun” is difficult to interpret. But I’ve tried, in my recent comments on Eccl. 3:
People read these with bad dichotomies: eternity vs. time; worldly life vs. spiritual life. The thing is, vv. 1-8 aren’t about “temporality” but about the religiously/liturgically ordered seasons. The antonymal pairs evoke night and day. The two sets of seven pairs evoke the week. The twenty-eight verbs evoke the month. The concept of joy in work evokes the Sabbatical rhythm. “Life under the sun” isn’t a life of despair; it’s a life of regular seasons marked by secular and religious rites of transition. The “eternity” in our hearts is the sense of completion towards which our seasonal experience is building. More to follow.
The claim of 1:3 is, by my reading, is the well-known notion that, under the natural conditions of life’s inherent seasonality and the religious conditions of Torah, yit’ron—profit, leftovers, investable remainder, or a liquid asset—is inconceivable.
I realized this in conversation with philosopher, Kit Apostolacus.
Fred Putnam pointed this out in a public lecture earlier at Church of the Good Samaritan in Paoli, PA earlier this week.