Today’s Bible reading: Ecclesiastes 3:18-22, 12:2-7.
The truth to which Solomon keeps coming back is this. It is mentioned over and over, so I have chosen just one passage. A person is not a lump of clay animated by a spirit, a spirit that is liberated from the lump of clay upon death. No. Man is an animal, and dies just like an animal. Is there a spirit that goes to heaven? Solomon openly declares not just that he does not know, but “Who can know?” This is agnosticism in its most elegant form, straight from the Bible.
“I said in my heart with regard to the sons of men that God is testing them, to show them that they are merely beasts. For the fate of the sons of men and the fate of the beasts is the same; as dies one, so dies the other. All have the same breath, and man has no advantage over the beasts…All go to one place, all are from the dust and return to the dust. Who knows whether the spirit of man flies upward and the spirit of the beast descends into the Earth?”
And this, he says, is the end of history: not a majestic conclusion, but the last whimper of extinction. “…in the day when the keepers of the house tremble, and strong men are bent over, sad people look through windows, the doors are shut, there is little sound of work being done, a man jumps in fright at the sound of a bird, grasshoppers drag their bellies along on the ground, people are mourning in the streets, the silver cord is snapped, the golden bowl broken, the pitcher is broken at the fountain, the wheel is broken at the cistern, and the dust returns to the earth, and breath back to God.”
Is there anything after death? Solomon hints at judgment, although he may be referring to the judgment of history. But he certainly describes no Heaven.
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