Today’s Bible Reading: Ecclesiastes 1: 1-11; 11: 13-14.
I am amazed that the Book of Ecclesiastes ever made it into the Bible. I can count with the fingers of one foot the number of times Ecclesiastes was ever deeply studied in any of the conservative churches to which I once belonged. Occasional quotes out of context, no more. Not something on any kid’s Sword of the Lord Bible Verse Memorization Chart.
The agnosticism expressed in this book is breathtaking. It is also very cynical, which is about all you could be if you did not believe that God rewarded good people on Earth and you had no alternative. Yet it made it into the Bible, along with the very sexy Song of Solomon which follows it.
And it is blazingly obvious that the last two verses were written by somebody else, which I paraphrase: “Okay, this has gone on long enough. So just get this straight. Don’t listen to all that stuff you just read. Just be afraid of God, be very afraid. Do what the priests tell you God wants you to do, for that is your entire purpose in life. God will announce every secret thought in your brain on judgment day, and everybody is going to know what you were thinking, you little wishy-washy doubters, and then you’ll be sooooooory!” But if you leave off those last two verses, the book of Ecclesiastes is the most heart-wrenchingly eloquent work of agnosticism that the ages have ever produced.
The writer (unlikely to have been Solomon, or a king at all) begins by describing the cycles of the universe. The sun goes around the Earth (from our perspective). The winds blow around the Earth. One generation of humans after another comes and goes. This could be made into an inspiring overview of the universe, but the writer made it cynical instead. All is vanity—that is, everything is a waste of time. He asks, what does a person gain from all of his work? And as the sun and the wind and the water go around and around, it is just such unutterable weariness! Modern historians debate over whether history is one damn thing after another or is the same damn thing over and over again. The writer of Ecclesiastes chose the latter. Not only is there nothing new under the sun, but nobody remembers what came before! This remains true today, when almost every detail of recent history is recorded; it is just that most of my students do not remember any of it.
In my youngest days, I found the hydrological cycle of the Earth (evaporation, condensation, rainfall, groundwater) to be inspiringly beautiful. Ecclesiastes has made it sad. But this was a necessary first step. Many religious people in that day (probably before 500 BCE) believed in a short history of the cosmos, from Eden until the day when God would establish his kingdom on Earth. Come to think of it, hundreds of millions of people still believe this. They do not believe that “what has been is what will be.” They do not believe that humans have been a very recent blip in the long history of the universe and the Earth. If we are now in the middle of the history of our universe—if the present were located at the pedestal of rocks near Smith Center, Kansas, which claims to be the geographical center of the United States—then a hundred-year lifespan is the width of a finger compared to the width of the North American continent. To the writer of Ecclesiastes, this realization was very humbling, and there was no scientific insight to replace it.
I find beauty and inspiration in the study of science, and in the slow work of doing things that help other people and the world. I am inspired by the fact that evolution has produced a human species capable of altruism. Alas, the writer of Ecclesiastes did not make it that far. I will have several more entries, in upcoming weeks, about Ecclesiastes.
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