Ecclesiastes (19) We cannot find it out

The book of Ecclesiastes tends to be neglected.
I must admit that I’ve been neglecting it myself.
So I come to this book with no preconceptions, except that a book found in the Old Testament must be intended to have a spiritual meaning. The people who compiled the canon were not in the business of collecting an anthology of “Hebrew literature.

The main theme of the early chapters has been that natural life and human life in the natural world do not go beyond a series of cycles of alternating events. Any apparent changes are discovered to be stages within these cycles, while the overall system itself does not change.

It is “vanity” for humans to look for anything beyond these things in the natural world, trying to transcend the system on their own. It is better, and the gift of God, for them to find their enjoyment in the world as it is, maintaining themselves in the way which God has provided.

Nevertheless, God has “put eternity into man’s mind”, in such a way that eternity cannot be known completely. Thus man is made aware of something greater than himself. “God has made it so, in order that men should fear before him.”

It seems that this nearly completes the central message of the book. Much of what follows looks like an assortment of “footnotes” under the general heading “other flaws noticeable in human life when God is disregarded”.

From ch8 v16 to ch9 v6

V16 “I applied my mind to know wisdom.”
He is testing once more how far his own mind can take him in sorting out a puzzle.

“To see the business that is done on earth, how neither day or night one’s eyes see sleep.”
The trouble is that the puzzle is too big. It really involves “life, the universe, and everything”, in a world where something detailed is always happening.

In the literal Hebrew of that last phrase, the negative is attached to “one sees”; “Day or night not one’s eyes see sleep.” There is always someone or something that is awake, there is always something that is happening. Certainly there are night-hunting creatures, and the streams don’t stop running at night. The Greek geographers had already worked out that the earth is a globe, which means that humanity is always awake in some part of the world, but we don’t know if the writer had heard about this.

V17 “Then I saw the work of God, that man cannot find out the work that is done under the sun.”
Anyway, God never sleeps. The detailed management of the world is beyond human capacity or understanding.

In fact he says three times in this verse that man cannot find it out. In spite of all the “toil” he puts into the investigation. In spite of all the claims a “wise man” may make for his own knowledge.

Ch9 v1 “But all this I laid to heart”.
This verse follows on from the previous verse, disregarding the chapter break, and continues the present theme. The Bible’s chapter divisions are much later than the text itself. Considerably so in the case of the New Testament, which contains at least a couple of places where a fresh chapter begins halfway through a sentence. So it is a mistake to read too much mystical meaning into chapter and verse numbers.

The chief puzzle that he wants to “find out” is the issue covered in the previous theme, namely the inappropriate rewards of the wicked and the righteous.

“How the righteous and the wise and their deeds are in the hand of God.”
This is the key to the answer.

“Whether it is love or hate man does not know”.
This is a very elliptical statement, and translators must decide how to expand it. The background idea is that men cannot know what God intends.
The AV expands into “No man knoweth either love or hatred BY all that is before them.” I suppose that means we cannot know whether good or evil is coming to us.
In the NIV, “no man knows whether love or hate awaits him”. If that means “from God”, then the question is whether he loves us as righteous or hates us as wicked. That is also the understanding of the International Critical Commentary (George Barton).
The Jerusalem Bible suggestion (as expanded in their footnotes) is that no man understands the emotions of love and hatred, which strikes me as particularly non-relevant to the context.

V2 “Everything before them is vanity, since one fate comes to all.”
Ultimately both sets of qualities seem to be cancelled out by death. There is another list of pairs, meeting the common fate;
Righteous and wicked
Good and evil
Clean and unclean
He who sacrifices and he who does not
The good man and the sinner
He who swears and he who shuns an oath

Since the pattern is evidently that the “positive” alternative is mentioned first, a couple of those pairs call for comment.
Offering sacrifice (to the true God) counts as a good thing in this environment. Of course God does not need the sacrificial offering itself, and his prophets complained because the habit of sacrifice was becoming a substitute for obedience and repentance. The real virtue is the willingness[/] to sacrifice. In fact the only kind of sacrifice that God really wants is the entire self-offering, as Paul showed us; “Present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God” (Romans chq2 v1).

And modern eyebrows may be raised by the last pair in the series. Shouldn’t they be the other way round? Surely swearing is a vice, and “he who shuns an oath” should be listed on the “good” side?

We need to remember the real function of swearing. It is the act of calling God as a witness to the truth of a statement, accompanied by the belief that God will punish a false oath. So the man who swears in the true sense is appealing to God, which is a good thing, and he is also by necessity a truth-teller. Whereas the man who shuns an oath must be a conscious liar who is afraid to take the risk.

V3 “There is an evil in all that is done under the sun, that one fate comes to all.”
Up to this point, the common undifferentiated fate is being regarded as one of the things that is wrong with the world.”

“Also the hearts of men are full of evil, and madness is in their hearts while they live, and after that they go to the dead.”
But now the focus turns towards death as the fate of the wicked. So he spends the next three verses dwelling with some relish on the fact that the state of the [wicked] dead is much worse than the state of the living.

V4 “A living dog is better than a dead lion.”
Normally the dog is despised, but lion-hood is no advantage if there is no life to go with it.
The living man has still has hope. Even if he knows only that he will die, that is still more knowledge than the dead themselves possess. And the people in the living world will have forgotten them.
V6 “They have no more for ever any share in all that is done under the sun.”

The fact that we can gloat over the state of the wicked dead is a form of compensation for the undeserved rewards they received during life. It does something to redress the balance of justice. The other half of the “compensation” is that the righteous may enjoy the life which God has given them, but I’ll save that for another time.