First in a series introduced here.
About Ecclesiastes, the general reader whose powers of comprehension are not routed by the radiant glow of Holy Text will have a question: How the hell did this make it into the Bible? As an editor of The Oxford Annotated Bible observes in a headnote, the book is "at variance [with Scripture's] dominant teaching."
What is the dominant teaching of Ecclesiastes? In brief, that life is meaningless. The remedies are all cheats, "vanity of vanities." Money, power, hedonism, learning, self-abnegation, wisdom, piety, working for justice--they are considered in turn and the conclusion is: vanity (in the sense of "worthless"). And it's not as if any is better, less vacuous, than another: after all, one end awaits both the wise man and the fool. It's this levelling power of death, understood as a dateless night, that makes the whole human enterprise such a poor farce. The language is dignifed but you can hear the rasping voice of Samuel Beckett. "If I don't kill that rat he'll die."
Speaking of rats may remind us that, in the author's bleak view, it is not just that rich men and wise men have no advantage over poor fools. It is also that there is no advantage to being human, or alive:
For the fate of the sons of men and the fate of beasts is the same; as one dies, so dies the other. They all have the same breath, and one man has no advantage over the beasts; for all is vanity. All go to one place; all are from the dust, and all turn to dust again. . . .
And I thought the dead who are already dead more fortunate than the living who are still alive; but better than both is he who has not yet been, and has not seen all the evil deeds that are under the sun.
To quote is to indicate the literary merit of the work, which derives to considerable extent from the way in which the march of tolling monosyllables conveys the author's stolid conviction. Rooting around in the commentaries, one hears and easily believes that it's even more impressive in Hebrew, which is especially amenable to terse expression (because there is no necessity of dispersing meaning across prepositional phrases). It's not surprising that Ecclesiastes seems to have been a favorite of some of the twentieth century's best writers. It receives a tribute in Thomas Wolfe's You Can't Go Home Again. For an epigraph to The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway chose a passage from its opening (King James version):
One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth forever . . . The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to the place where he arose . . . The wind goeth toward the south, and turneth about unto the north; it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to his circuits. . . . All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again.
As with the natural backdrop, so also with human beings. The appearance of portentous activity obscures the essential facts of the case. That's the idea that meant something to Hemingway, and one of Housman's most memorable poems is a summarizing paraphrase:
Stars, I have seen them fall,
But when they drop and die
No star is lost at all
From all the star-sown sky.
The toil of all that be
Helps not the primal fault:
It rains into the sea
And still the sea is salt.
Despite the sorry state of biblical literacy in our pious country, a portion of Ecclesiastes is known to almost everyone. That's because the lyric to Pete Seeger's "Turn! Turn! Turn!(to Everything There Is a Season)," which is drawn wholly from Chapter 3 of the biblical text, became an international hit when covered by The Byrds in 1965. See if this doesn't sound familiar:
For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up . . . . [Etc., etc.]
In the popular culture, these words indicate that at different times people should make different choices, and that now is the time to choose healing and peace. When considered within the context of Ecclesiastes, however, it's pretty clear that they were intended by the original author as an expression of thoroughgoing determinism. People may be under the impression that they are steering their ship, avoiding the rocks and shallows though possibly suffering calamity if they make a poor choice. But the truth is that everything happens at the time fixed for it to happen. Turn, turn, turn through the insults to your Sunday school teacher's most cherished beliefs.
The literary excellence of which I spoke applies only to individual segments. The book as a whole seems disjointed and lacking in coherent transitions. Scholars have attempted to discover whether we are missing parts of the text, or we have separate texts that have just been spliced together without benefit of editorial additions, or what. Moreover, the logical connection from sentence to sentence sometimes seems weak. Since this occurs frequently when the text edges away from its unorthodox teaching, scholarship has detected the hand of a scandalized editor. There is no question that the conclusion--
The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God, and keep his commandments; for this is the whole duty of man. For God will bring every deed into judgment, with every secret thing, whether good or evil.
--was not written by the primary author. The less tactful version is: "Finally, it's over! The heretic has been heard to the end. Now forget what he says and instead fear God, keep His commandments, and [drifts toward incoherence but with the dark suggestion that the author will receive his just deserts]." It is not really known to what degree this, or another, orthodox glossator may have tinkered with the words of the author. Not very much, it seems to me, for, once started, why stop? Yet the corpus of a memorable and offending text remains intact.
So, how did Ecclesiastes make it past the gatekeepers and into the canon of sacred texts? The most usual answer concerns a tradition that attributes its authorship to King Solomon. For many reasons, this is impossible. There are very good reasons to suppose the book was composed in the Hellenistic Period, long after Solomon was dead. Peake's Commentary on the Bible adds, "The author also, incongruously for Solomon, refers to a number of royal predecessors in Jerusalem (1:16, 2:9), writes in the vein of subject rather than of ruler (3:16, 4:1), hints at anarchy in the contemporary scene (4:13-16, 10:16-20), and in the epilogue (12:9-14) is not referred to as a king."
The inclusion in the Bible of the Book of Ecclesiastes strikes me as an attractive mistake.