Here’s the text in translation:
Each-thing [God] has-made beautiful in its time. Also, eternity he-has-given in their hearts, (no,) not that one can find the work that God has done from its beginning to its end.
Here are the observations:
The first word is et-hakkol, or “each thing.” This evokes Paul’s description of God’s plan to unite “all things.” If a direct object is the first word of a sentence, it’s the emphasis.
“Each,” “make,” and “God” are words repeated to make the Genesis 1 poem. This verse is about God’s full creation: “beginning to end.”
“Beautiful” is an aesthetic word (duh), the primary sense of which is “fitting,” “suitable,” or “appropriate.” Think Peter: “It is fitting that we are here.”
“Time” is et, a word that had been used 28 times in vv. 2-8.
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.
This helps:
One’s reading of Ecclesiastes hangs on our translation—rather, our conceptualization—of hevel. Is it “meaninglessness”? No. Is it vanity? Kind of (the Vulgate has vanitas), but that requires a better sense of Victorian English than any of us has. Is it breath? Sure. Vapor or mist? Yes.
The key is not that, as opposed to God, it is insubstantial. The moral of Ecclesiastes—this chapter, or the whole book—is not to turn our eyes to heavenly things, or to take hold of the God who doesn’t change. (Sure, do that, though.)
No, the key is that hevel is “fleeting.” Try some other assonant words that also feature verbs: fleeing, flitting, flighty. The point of vv. 2-8 is that times flee.
I’m taking wedding vows in three weeks. And this is precious time. Once we’re married, I’ll never be three weeks away from marriage again. I can’t grasp this time. It’s fleeting. I have to “be present.”
You know what flee(t)s and is beautiful? Music. I think of the fugue (from fugare, to flee). You can enjoy music, but you can’t catch it. It’s in its nature to fly away.
Here it is, put together into prose:
When St. Irenaeus describes the creation that God is making, from beginning to end, he calls it a symphony. Specifically, he calls it “the symphony of salvation.” This is the thing that Qohelet says man both has in his heart and cannot find out.
What man can know is the times we are given. We know what a mild recession is, and what it’s like to be a first-year university student. We know what it’s like to be three weeks away from a wedding, and what it’s like to be woken up by a newborn. Tell any grounded person your experience, and you’ll find resonance.
What does it add up to? Specifically, what is God making of it all? We have intimations of themes: By attending to the toil, trouble, and joys of these times, we come to understand perhaps not the dogma of salvation, nor even the story, but the symphony. We can sense the ways in which our variations on the theme of the life of Israel or the life of Christ relate to. Again, Irenaeus says of God’s work that He is “harmonizing” our lives to the “symphony of salvation.”
There is no escaping life under the sun—that is, the life of waking up and going to sleep, the dialectic of work and rest, the inevitability of aging and the wind and waves of life. There is no “heaven” to escape to. Even St. Francis is susceptible to depression and arthritis. Appeals to heaven and God’s solidness, while true, may not be helpful, as is often the case with bottom-shelf Christian neoplatonism. (Your dog died? Try God. He never dies.) This is why the American Church has unofficially canonized Wendell Berry.
What makes life easier to bear is having friends who witness our lives (see Eccl. 4:9-12). Can they fix life? No. But when I tell my men’s Bible study what it’s like to be three weeks away from marriage, there’s one guy whose twenty-year marriage has “gone by so fast,” another who was celebrating his sixteenth anniversary, and a third whose wife had died four years prior. Our lives are different but simultaneous, irreducibly unique but inescapably familiar (“There is nothing new…”).
The hevel of life, our times and their toils, are not “meaningless,” but precious. And there is nothing better to do but to enjoy them insofar as you’re able.