Praise God. A new friend out here invited me to a Bible study tomorrow. It’s on Ecclesiastes 3. Here are some of my notes on the structure and hypotheses about its meaning:
v. 1 - There is an "appointed time" (tz'man) for everything (kol). That's an uncommon, Late Hebrew word that seems to mean the same as "appointed time" (mo'ed) in Early Hebrew
vv. 2-8 - "A time (et) to" and then 14 pairs of opposites, all but the center two pairs in the infinitive. 14 pairs are 28 verbs, and the month is 28 days (4*7 weeks). The pairs evoke day v. night. The structure evokes days, weeks, months; and the lexicon evokes seasons.
v. 9 - "What profit (yit'ron) is there..." Profit does mean surplus, not revenue. I think the question is just, Can you win a surplus to escape the ups and downs of the seasons? Andrew Tate says Yes. Qohelet says No. Interesting that ‘profit’ is a supra-seasonal concept for Qohelet, and a vapor.
v. 11 - "He has made everything (kol) fitting (yapheh) in its time (et)." Elsewhere, yapheh is 'beautiful.' The point is both moral and providential - all activities (vv. 2-8) and things (like us!) have a time. I think Paul samples this for his "fullness of time" comment (Gal. 4:4)
vv. 12-15 - "all" (kol) appears 3x: all men, all labor, all things God does. I don't understand v. 15b at all.
v. 13 - seeing good (tov) in your trouble (amal) isn’t about silver linings; it’s about the Sabbath. that’s what all the sevens were for earlier. life is a seasonal cycle of work and holiday, labor and sabbath, ups and downs. finding joy in the toil isn’t about liking your job; it’s about liking your life… which contains your job (unless you’ve found supra-seasonal wealth / yit’ron.
vv. 16-22 "under the sun" is temporal, not spatial or ideological - it means within the matrix of seasonality (cf. Gen. 1:14); also note that "under the sun" appears 29x in Ecclesiastes, just like "I" (ani) appears 29x. Hm.
v. 17 - God's judgment seems to be judgment of our wisdom: is killing good? usually No, but there *is* a time (v. 3). Roll with the seasons, do good, enjoy life, and wait for God to judge. implied: there is a time for judgment, and by that time, all things will have become as beautiful (v. 11) as they will
v. 21 - It's not who knows 'whether' - he's not agnostic; he humbles them - who knows 'that' we ascend to God for judgment
vv. 16-22 - Okay, I'm persuaded that this paragraph is about deferring judgment:
- v. 16 all good things have some wicked
- v. 17 God will judge all things
- vv. 19-20 beasts and men appear to have the same fate
- v. 21 and no one can verify that men rise for judgment
- v. 22 do good and be happy, knowing you can't make a profit by being cunning (v. 9) or make a moral profit by being morally cunning
The whole chapter evokes not just temporality/finitude in general, but seasonality in particular. Most of this comes through the structure. There are two thrusts toward the future: beatification (v. 11) and judgment (v. 17).
Liking life means discerning the right time to do stuff, and not judging because you don’t really know and God will do that anyway.