What do you gain from working hard all your life?

I have been in this world of affairs, where god has placed the family of humankind.

God has made all things beautiful in their time: but he has hidden this beauty in forever, so that no one of us can see our true calling from start to finish.

I feel then that there is nothing to do but be happy, joyous and of service while we are alive.

We must eat and drink and enjoy the good things which come of all our worry and toil because these are god’s gifts to us.

I know that whatever god does it is forever: nothing can be added, nothing taken away, and we must accept and respect it.

And the future god seeks is the past: that which has been is now; and that which is to be has already been.

Eccles. 3:9-15 [KB]

I left out “vanity of vanities” because it wasn’t the message I wanted to hear. But I’ve begun to question that omission.

I’ve outlined the entire book to help myself, and you the reader, get a sense of the whole, original context. And I have to admit that the preponderance challenges my choice as atypical and off-message. Based on what I’ve sketched out in the preceding paragraphs, it does look as though the central theme of the book’s message is the phrase “vanity of vanities” or its alternative “vexation of the spirit”—afflictio spiritus in the Vulgate, which the American Standard Version of the Bible translates as “striving after wind.” The brighter counter-theme “live joyfully” is muted, infrequent, delimited by the sharp, ink-dark scrawls of “vanity” and “vexation” which abound throughout the twelve chapters.

But I still do not believe that the counsel of Qohelet, the narrator of the Book of Ecclesiastes, is as gloomy and cynical as it would appear in these translations. And I do believe the passages I’ve chosen are more than integral to some greater hidden message which I am struggling to grasp. A dialectic.

My good friend Philip reminds me that Qohelet could be reflecting Buddha’s message:

All life is suffering. Consequently, I rejoice.

—Philip Blackburn’s paraphrase, margin notes on this essay, 24 February, 2009.

Yes. Buddha’s ideas could have traveled to Qohelet via Alexander’s soldiers. Philosopher Pyrrho of Elea, recognized as the first Athenian Skeptic, served under the empire-builder as a young man, accompanying Alexander to India in the late 4^th c. with the latter’s eudaemonist advisor, Anaxarchus. Twenty years their senior, blunt and unconventional, Anaxarchus influenced commander Alexander and soldier Pyrrho with the ideas of his own mentor, Democritus. Rival of Aristotle, Democritus’ ideas about contentment through acceptance of life on life’s terms and the goal of ataraxia, or “the detached and balanced state of mind that shows that a person has transcended the material world and is now harvesting all the comforts of philosophy” ("Ataraxia”, Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) were fundamental to later Greek strains, Stoicism and Epicureanism. And sound suspiciously similar to Buddhist tenets

The idea of Indian influence itself has a vibrant history: Sir William Jones shocked the Royal Asiatic Society with the linguistic similarities of Sanskrit, Greek and Latin in 1786. His declaration lit a firestorm in European imagination—was India the first civilization?—which burned well into the early 19^th c. The forgotten thought recurred in the 1930s then built into heated dialogue, articles and research over the next two decades. In the late 1950s just before she died, Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) traced a connection via Megasthenes (350-290 BCE), Seleucid ambassador to India (Plant’s biography, 2007, p.149). Flower power and the Beatles brought renewed popular interest in Indian culture in the 70s. In his 2002 The Shape of Ancient Thought, brilliant ascetic Thomas McEvilley makes an epic and undeniable 21^st-c. case for earlier intellectual intercourse between pre-Buddhistic Indians and pre-Socratic Greeks via the welcoming and effusively multicultural courts of the Persian regime 545-490 BCE, a period which included not only the birth of Greek philosophy on the nearby Ionian coast of Asia Minor but also the tail end of Jewish Babylonian Captivity followed by a centuries-lingering diasporic Judaic presence in Persia after liberation.

So the possibility that Qohelet as a student of the contemporary wisdom of his day, was influenced, either directly by Indian ideas—Hindu, Jainist or the teachings of Buddha—via Mesopotamia or indirectly via the Greeks’ digesting thereof, is very possible. It speaks to the imbalance that bothers me about interpretations of Ecclesiastes as morbidly uninvested in life. In a Hindu light, the “vanity of vanities” becomes Ahamkara the self-centered illusion that distracts the soul from understanding truth. It is indeed an afflictio spiritus that must be overcome along with karma so that the soul can abandon duality and become immortal in oneness. The only catch is that Qohelet does not seem to believe in any sort of human immortality. He stresses over and over that this life is all there is and that this life should be its own reward.

Which sounds more like Buddhism? Qohelet’s “nothing is new” along with “vanity of vanities” and his description of the incomprehensibility of natural cycles in the time poem, lead us toward first mark of existence, aniccaor anitya, or impermanence, that everything is change. What is constant for Qohelet is that we cannot ever understand, as humans, or predict change. Impermanence is permanent. The constancy of flux.

The second dharma seal or mark of existence, dukkha or duhkha, suffering, appears in Qohelet’s world view too, as Philip pointed out: none of the material wealth and privilege he achieved gave him pleasure. The book’s premise is his frustration with the emptiness, perhaps pointlessness, of worldly satisfactions.

He that loveth silver shall not be satisfied with silver;

nor he that loveth abundance with increase: this is also vanity.

—Eccles. 5:10 [KJV]

Anattaor anatman, or the lack of self, is harder to find, but I find it in Qohelet’s counsel to visit the house of mourning rather than the house of feasting:

It is better to go to the house of mourning than to go to the house of feasting; for this is the end of all men, and the living will lay it to heart.

—Eccles. 7:2 [RSV]

or in:

For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts…:

as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath;

so that a man hath no preeminence above a beast: for all is vanity.

—Eccles. 3:19 [KJV]

Bringing these three marks of existence into moment-by-moment awareness in order to achieve wisdom could be said to be the teaching of the Book of Ecclesiastes. But Qohelet is not trying to free us from the illusion of life. He is trying to encourage us to embrace life for what it is without illusion. Money is useful. Repair your roof. Don’t talk too much. Obey your king. Wear white and anoint yourself with perfumed oil. Love your wife, have sex. Eat. Drink. Enjoy what is, but don’t covet.

Better is the sight of the eyes than the wandering of the desire: this is also vanity and vexation of spirit.

—Eccles. 6:4-5, 9 [KJV]

For Qohelet there is no promise of nirvana later, to assuage the pain of now. For him nirvana and samsara are both now, and only now.

Go thy way, eat thy bread with joy, and drink thy wine with a merry heart…

Let thy garments be always white; and let thy head lack no ointment.

Live joyfully with the wife whom thou lovest…

Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might;

for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest.

—Eccles. 9:7-10 [KJV]

So was Qohelet Buddhist? Could he have come up with such ideas independently? Is it wrong to interpret him in a “Buddhist” way?

But I imagine ideas traveling by air, windblown, like spores. Seeding in distant minds serendipitously. We don’t ever acknowledge how “in the air” the beginnings of an idea are at any one time. Not owned by any one human but incipient, unformed, embryonic, like a protoplasm of thought. Until suddenly fully articulated by one, then credited to him or her, usually him. Light bulb.

the jewish side

My speculation on East-West contagion in the ancient world’s plethora of ideas doesn’t explain why current Western interpretations of Ecclesiastes are so negative. My student Amitai Gross gives a more contemporary answer:

Orthodox Jewish belief is that King Solomon wrote Kohelet right at the end of his life actually as sort of a bitter last will and testament. And according to them, he lived a pretty long time.

—Amitai Gross, Class of 2012, Bennington College, 27 February 2009.

Traditionalist Jews and Christians, both, see Solomon as the author of Ecclesiastes. But that doesn’t explain why they see Ecclesiastes as negative. The “bitter last will” explanation seems after-the-fact. Because Ecclesiastes is pessimistic, in their view, Solomon’s old age must have been bitter. The first premise is the observation that Qohelet is negative. I ask, do all Jews then see Qohelet as negative? Whether or not he’s Solomon?

Piling up against my hopes for a perceived positive message, folkloric phenomenon Wikipedia recounts the alleged Talmudic view that “the point of Qohelet [Ecclesiastes] is to state that all is futile under the sun.” Other commentaries find the autobiographical account and his advice, cynical and self-contradictory: life is pointless, so enjoy life in the present.

Qohelet, I conclude, finds no ultimate good and no foundational principle in the universe…Ours is not a world that admits human reason or responds to our longing for meaning—it is an absurd existence…The book is cast in an autobiographical voice, plays with the dynamics of aphorism and tautology, and, most significantly, builds itself around the poetics of contradiction. The text is engaged in a continual process of erasure whereby statements are made, explored, and then negated. I conclude by considering two modern analogues to the book of Qohelet, Albert Camus and Lev Shestov…

—Benjamin Lyle Berger, University of Victoria, abstract for “Qohelet and the Exigencies of the Absurd,”

Biblical Interpretation: A Journal of Contemporary Approaches, Volume 9, Number 2, (Brill, 2001), 141-179(39).

Negative to the point of absurd.

Because of its carpe diem message, however, and perhaps too, because of the agrarian wisdom offered herein, this scripture is read by the Ashkenazim and others (practices vary) during the Jewish festival of Sukkot, the “Season of our Rejoicing,” giving thanks for the fall harvest. Which makes me think that maybe the Ashkenazim hear the message as hopeful in some way.

One might find slight hope in the more Reform Essential Judaism’s explanation of the coupling of Sukkot with Qohelet:

For Sukkot, the book read is Kohelet/Ecclesiastes, a coolly detached rumination on the natural cycle and man’s brief span within it. As we will see…it is an apt choice.

—George Robinson, Essential Judaism: A Complete Guide to Beliefs, Customs and Rituals, (New York: Pocket Books, Simon & Schuster, 2000), 107.

But hope that Ecclesiastes might be perceived by today’s Jewish EveryPerson as having a positive message, is dashed, when the guide goes on to describe the biblical book further:

The bleakly pessimistic and cynical book called Ecclesiastes (Kohelet in Hebrew after its putative author) is usually ascribed to an aging King
Solomon. Its author decries the meaninglessness of the pursuit of wealth, wisdom, and pleasure. Interspersed with dour observations are a series of maxims that suggest this may be a compilation drawn from other Near Eastern wisdom literature of the time. One of the Five Megillot, Ecclesiastes is read on the Sabbath that falls during Sukkot, perhaps a reflection of the approach of winter.

—Robinson, Essential Judaism, 293-294.

The author doesn’t even think Qohelet wrote the book! Bleak pessimism, wintry cynicism and mongrel wisdom. Negative of negatives.

For a more lyrical insight into Ecclesiastes’ contemporary Jewish image, I found this contribution to the 1987 Congregation: Contemporary Writers Read the Jewish Bible by writer Daphne Merkin, prodigal daughter of an Orthodox household:

The message I take from Koheleth is that sadness flows under the skin of things, like blood. It is a part of life—Freud’s “ordinary unhappiness,” what we are left with even after “neurotic misery” is cured—not to be avoided, but to be recognized and understood. Once understood, it becomes possible to contain the sadness within circles of light:
orbs of warmth against the encroaching chill. When I look back at the succah of my childhood, it stands out in my memory as one of those circles, a confining but also cozy haven. If it makes me somewhat wistful to realize that I am now irrevocably outside the radius of the succah—that I have moved away from its green smell and its flickering candles, its food and conversation—I also realize that for me it was a necessary, liberating step. Still, who knows if there won’t come a day when I will once again step inside under the canopy of s’chach and inhale the complex religion of my upbringing as it wafts by me?

If the news the sober, immensely clear-eyed writer of this book brings us is that there are no second acts, even in Jewish lives, who is to say what twists and turns the first and only act holds in store for us? Ayn chadash tachat hashemesh is perhaps the single most famous sentence in Ecclesiastes: “There is nothing new under the sun.” What else can this mean except that possibility is recurrent; nothing is surprising, nothing is absolutely unprecedented. In our leavetakings are the stirrings of return.

—Daphne Merkin, chapter on “Ecclesiastes,"Congregation: Contemporary Writers Read the Jewish Bible, David Rosenberg, ed. (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1987), 404-405.

And now I’m sure. But of what, I’m not sure. Merkin’s personal understanding of Ecclesiastes informs me more thoroughly—around the back door and through the open windows of my intuition—with her vivid, coherent impression of an everyday sort of “sadness.” “Sober,” “immensely clear-eyed” but somehow familiar, even inviting in its inextricable connection to the fall festival, still green, but dark in its Sabbath hour, mysterious under its outdoor enclosure. It tells me that there is something welcome about the tang of Ecclesiastes’ realism against the sweet late-summer confusion of a shared family event. And she closes with an antithesis in the manner of Qohelet, reminding us that in death there is life, as in life there is death. So yes, the contemporary Jewish view of Ecclesiastes is dark, but Merkin, and perhaps others, are enlightened by a glimmer of something else too.

I am encouraged.

De Modina public garden in the marginal and mixed Shapira neighborhood of Tel Aviv during Sukkot festival. 16 October 2008(2008-10-16). Photo by Roi Boshi. All rights released to the public domain. Wikimedia Commons. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Public_Garden_in_Shapira_Neighborhood.JPG

the protestant side

Ecclesiastes Chapter 2 is the passage I’ve heard most frequently from the Protestant pulpit. The ministers read aloud to us as Qohelet narrates in detail the material wealth he has accumulated—houses, vineyards, gardens, orchards, ponds, trees, servants, maidens, musicians, cattle, silver and gold, and “whatsoever mine eyes desired.” Then, looking pointedly at their congregations, “Vanity of vanities! All is vanity!” have railed the good Protestant preachers through the ages (and passed the basket).

Geneva Bible, open to the Book of Matthew. The marginal glosses can be seen in smaller type on the sides. The prefaces are short sentences beneath each chapter heading before the actual text begins with the embroidered drop capital letter. Photo by Hi540, December 14, 2007. Permission GFDL. Wikimedia Commons. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:GenevaBible.JPG

From the get-go, Protestant Christianity made great damnatory hay out of the word “vanity.” It went well with fire and brimstone. A pessimistic read in this life brightened the promise of the afterlife, as we can read in the Geneva Bible (1560), one of the earliest in the English language, predating the King James by 51 years. The GB not only included a brand new vernacular translation but extensive marginal glosses and newly inserted prefaces which cast the old words in the Protestant image.

Here is my crude facsimile of the Geneva Bible page layout for the opening of Ecclesiastes:

ECCLESIASTES, or the Preacher.

THE ARGUMENT.

Salomon, as a preacher and one that desired to instruct all in the way of Salvation, describeth the deceivable vanities of this world: that man should not be addicted to anie thing under the Sunne, but rather inflamed with the desire of the heavenlie life: therefore he confuteth their opinions, which set their felicitie, ether in knowledge, or in pleasures, or in dignitie and riches, shewing that mans true felicitie consisteth in that he is united with God and shal enjoy his presence: so that all other things must be rejected, save in as muche as they further us to atteine to this heavenlie treasure, which is sure and permanent, and cannot be founde in anie other save in God alone.

CHAP. I.

2 All things in this worlde are ful of vanitie, and none of indurance. 13 All man’s wisdome is but folie and grief.

1 The wordes of the ^a Preacher, the sonne of David, King in Jerusalem.

^a Solomon is here called a preacher, or one who assembles the people, because he teaches the true knowledge of God, and how men ought to pass their life in this transitory world.

2 ^b Vanitie of vanities, Saith ye Preacher: vanitie of vanities, all is vanitie.

^b He condemns the opinions of all men who set happiness in anything but in God alone, seeing that in this world all things are as vanity and nothing.

—gb-ecclesiastes.pdf, “A Digital Version of the 1560 Geneva Bible”, Digital Christian Library. http://www.thedcl.org/bible/gb/index.html

The prefatory “argument” overshadows the reading with the following messages: To learn about salvation, read this. Don’t be deceived by worldly vanity. Don’t be addicted to anything under the sun (have contempt for this mortal coil). Be enflamed with desire (sexual wording) for the heavenly life (nonsexual). You are wrong about happiness. Happiness is not knowledge, or sensual pleasure, or status or wealth. True happiness is to be one with god, enjoy god’s presence. Reject everything else, unless it helps you to attain this. This heavenly treasure (money word, desire again) is secure and lasting (words which allay fear). And you can only find it here (you have no choice).

The sensuality of shame—a sort of reverse hedonism—is potent. This application of Ecclesiastes is nothing like its gentle, if sardonic, pairing with the festival of Sukkot. On the other hand, Qohelet’s tale is sensual and sexy to start. How does that fit with the cozy family spending Shabbat under the succah branches? Do they read that part (Chapter 2) quickly so the children won’t hear? Or is the prurience of my reaction unconsciously Puritan?

John Wesley (1703-1791), founder of the Methodist movement, espouser of “prevenient grace” (counter-balance to original sin, or the virtue we are born with) and an open-air orator in the Great Awakening, expanded on the “vanity” trope:

Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher,
vanity of vanities; all is vanity.

Vanity

- Not only vain, but vanity in the abstract, which denotes extreme vanity.

Saith

- Upon deep consideration and long experience, and by Divine inspiration. This verse contains the general proposition, which he intends particularly to demonstrate in the following book.

All

- All worldly things.

Is vanity

- Not in themselves for they are God’s creatures and therefore good in their kinds, but in reference to that happiness, which men seek and expect to find in them. So they are unquestionably vain, because they are not what they seem to be, and perform not what they promise, but instead of that are the occasions of innumerable cares, and fears, and sorrows, and mischiefs. Nay, they are not only vanity but vanity of vanities, the vainest vanity, vanity in the highest degree. And this is redoubled, because the thing is certain, beyond all possibility of dispute.

—John Wesley, 1754-1765, Eccles. 1:2 Commentary, Biblos.com, Parallel Bible. http://biblecommenter.com/ecclesiastes/1-2.htm

The virulence of the “vanity” invective cannot be understated. Its damnation of “this transitory world” has become a cornerstone to Christian interpretation of Ecclesiastes. Gone is the “sober, clear-eyed” Qohelet and his wintry cynicism. Fiery pessimism of a Preacher, remade in the Protestant image, is essential for shepherding the living into eligibility for future grace. The light/dark balance is symmetrical but the light is “off-screen.” What’s actually on the page is dark meat only.

How does Ecclesiastes play in Christianity today? Positive? Negative? I found this letter exchange with Dr. Billy Graham:

DEAR DR. GRAHAM: Recently, a celebrity I’ve always admired announced that he had become a member of a particular religious group, which most people say is a cult. Why would an otherwise intelligent person like him get involved in a cult? I find it all very confusing. — Mrs. L.R.

DEAR MRS. L.R.: I don’t know why this particular person has gotten involved with this group; people get involved in cults for all kinds of reasons. For example, some people are very lonely, and cults often go out of their way to make them feel accepted. But I suspect this person’s real reason for getting involved with this group is because down inside he is spiritually empty, and he hopes this group might have the answer to his spiritual hunger. You see, down inside we all hunger for God (even if we don’t realize it, or even deny it). The reason is because God made us this way; as the Bible says, "He has also set eternity in the hearts of men" (Ecclesiastes 3:11).

In other words, God made us to be His friends and have a personal relationship with Him forever. But when we turn our backs on Him, the empty place in our hearts remains unfilled, and nothing will satisfy it. This person has experienced virtually everything life has to offer — fame, money, pleasure, status and so forth. But his experience will be no different from the man in the Bible who ended up crying, "When I surveyed all that my hands had done … everything was meaningless" (Ecclesiastes 2:11).

Pray for this person, that he may face his need of Christ and turn to Him. And if you have never done so, open your own heart to Christ’s transforming love and power.

—Rev. Billy Graham, “Only God Satisfies the Empty Place in Our Hearts,” August 9, 2007, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, © 1998-2009 Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Use under Limited License for Non-Commercial Use with Appropriate citation. Judged fair use. http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/graham/324011_billy810.html

Though in direct descent from the earlier Protestant readings, Dr. Graham’s use of these verses from Ecclesiastes is decontextualized and semiotic. The “eternity set in the hearts of men” (3:11b) immediately follows the time poem (3:1-8). The context encourages an interpretation of time beyond comprehension, an infinity which overwhelms human perception, making temporal understanding god’s alone. Out of context, it becomes the afterlife. Interestingly in 2:11, Dr. Graham has softened the “vanity” invective to “meaningless” and his read seems closer to the original than the earlier Protestants’. But the punch-line is Christ—certainly not Qohelet’s punch-line.

Again, the Christian interpretation predicates a positive message from Ecclesiastes on its audience’s prior acceptance of significance extraneous to the immediate text. Stripped of these extras, Christian interpretation of Ecclesiastes seems deeply pessimistic. But I pause, concerned about my own prejudice. Like Daphne Merkin, I left the fold long ago. So I explore the Web-waves further.

I found this portion of a July 2003 sermon from the First Presbyterian Church in Jackson, Mississippi. The preacher, J. Ligon Duncan, encourages his congregation to get their bibles and turn to Ecclesiastes 6 where they will pick up their study from last week. He comforts their fears that Ecclesiastes is too dark and pessimistic:

This is a book about satisfaction, about meaning in life, about fulfillment, about fullness, about significance, about happiness and blessedness. Now, you’re thinking to yourself, “Hmmm, those aren’t the words that struck me as I’ve been meditating on this book over the last five weeks or so because it’s so often a bleak book. And [a] book that starts out with “Vanity of vanities, all is vanities” is not one of those books that you’re expecting to be an upbeat, optimistic look at the world.

…You see, there are two problems that necessitate the Preacher taking this tact [sic]. The first is there are so many people involved in the quest for meaning and looking for it in the wrong places, and he’s got to show them how they’ll never find meaning in those wrong places. But the other problem is people seeking meaning in the wrong places and finding in this life a tremendous level of contentment, to the point that if they don’t think, they are perfectly happy like they are, when in fact, they are not experiencing true meaning and satisfaction and blessedness; they are experiencing a false substitute.

We’ve seen him in chapter one take the way of wisdom. “I’m going to reflect about life; I’m going to think about it deeply. I’m going to come up with a philosophy of life which will give it meaning apart from God.” And he says, “No, you won’t.” And when that fails, he looks at the escape route of pleasure. And we saw that in chapter one and two. “OK, if I can’t think my way into meaning, I’ll at least have a good time on my way to satisfaction. I’ll have fun.” And he says, “That way won’t work either.” And then there’s the way of work. The last time we were together, we looked at the way of affluence—having lots of money and things.

And he says, “Each of those ways to happiness, blessedness, meaning, fullness, fulfillment, satisfaction, is a dead end.” Each of those ways cannot, in and of themselves, provide satisfaction in this life. Only God can provide satisfaction. The only positive answer he has given to us so far is in asking us to look squarely at the providing hand of God. That’s where meaning comes from…

— J. Ligon Duncan, " Ecclesiastes 6: The Emptiness of Life without God ", First Presbyterian Church, Jackson, MS, 07/20/2003. Permitted limited reproduction – Quotations, citations, and references. Must list: As downloaded on February 22, 2009, URL: http://www.fpcjackson.org/resources/sermons/Ecclesiastes/04b.htm

And he lets them have it direct from the source, quoting from the Ecclesiastes Chapter 6, Revised Standard Version of the Bible, basically a modernized, American version of the King James:

“There is an evil which I have seen under the sun…For who knows what is good for a man during his lifetime, during the few years of his futile life? He will spend them like a shadow…” Amen. This is God’s Word…

—Duncan, 2003

After the strong medicine, he invites them to pray. In his own words, Reverend Duncan then adjusts the message:

Show us the idols; show us the things that we desire more than You. Show us the things that we desire instead of You. If we are apart from You, show us our deepest unhappiness; an unhappiness that can only be answered by Your Word, Yourself.

—Duncan, 2003

He encourages them to resist:

Now you say to the author of Ecclesiastes, “Look, you are the consummate pessimist. I know lots of wealthy people whom that is not the case with. They work hard and make a lot of money and they enjoy it.” And his response is, “My point is not that this happens every time. My point is it not only happens, it happens often, that people invest themselves in gaining riches and wealth and they themselves don’t end up enjoying them one way or the other. It’s not that some of them die and don’t enjoy them; it’s that some of them live and don’t enjoy them.” He has already said that wealth and the enjoyment of wealth are two different things. Being able to enjoy the wealth that God has given is a gift from God. Just because you have wealth doesn’t mean that you can truly enjoy it. He not only distinguishes wealth and the enjoyment of wealth, he distinguishes wealth, the enjoyment of wealth, and true satisfaction. Those are three different things. And so he is saying that I’m telling you that this is always this way; I’m a pessimist.

—Duncan, 2003

And so the p-word emerges at last. The v-word “vanity” is never used but it underlies the crux of Duncan’s intelligent and accessible interpretation of the Book of Ecclesiastes, and aligns him with his Christian forbears. Here is that crux, in essence, if not in word, as he concludes his sermon:

What about you? Where is your satisfaction found today? Is it in going to the right school? Joining the right sorority and fraternity? Marrying the right person and settling in the right neighborhood and living the right kind of life? Is it in the abundance of wealth? Is it in social status? Is it in having the perfect family? Is it living a long and blessed life? Is it bouncing your own grandchildren on your knee and seeing them married to the right kind of people? Or is it in God?

—Duncan, 2003

J. Ligon Duncan. 2/26/2009 10:42:00 AM.

Photo by C. J. Mahaney. Sovereign Grace Ministries Blog “C.J. Mahaney’s view from the cheap seats & other stuff”—Meet Ligon Duncan (2).

http://www.sovereigngraceministries.org/Blog/post/Meet-Ligon-Duncan-(2).aspx

© Sovereign Grace Ministries. www.SovereignGraceMinistries.org

And here is where my question starts to coalesce:

What if we have deliberately mis-translated? What if the word “vanity” is misleading? What if it suited Puritan-influenced translators in London in the early 1700s to use the word “vanity”? But not us—because the meaning of the word has “migrated” or because we bimillennial folk have a different relationship with self-love—as borne out by the elimination of the word “vanity” from modern Christian evangelism. Or because many of us are atheists and we do not fear a god, but we do fear shame and ostracism. And what if the entire modern—certainly the Christian—view of Ecclesiastes has been transmuted by this veil of deeper, angrier verbal color?

And just as the Jewish name Keholet or Qohelet, for the book as well as the writer, has been squeezed out of use among the Jews themselves by the Greek name “Ecclesiastes” used by Christians, mayn’t the sharp edge of pessimism in the Jewish view have been honed and stropped by the culturally ubiquitous “vanity” as a moral goad in the English-speaking Western world?

The Hebrew root abêl—doubled for intensification—is indeed translated as “emptiness, vanity” from the verb habal “to be vain in act, word or expectation; to lead astray.” But vanity is the secondary meaning; in other words, “to act in vain” is not the same as “to behave with vanity”.

While the Vulgate’s

Vanitas vanitatum, dixit Ecclesiastes; vanitas vanitatum, et omnia vanitas

—Eccles. 1:2 [Vulgate]

appears to be aligned with the King James Version, the Latin word vanitas actually means “hollowness or emptiness.” Which leads me to wonder how early the semantic divergence occurred. With Protestant Christianity’s King James and Geneva Bibles, Luther’s German, or Wyclif’s Middle English in the 1380s or even earlier?

What is the Catholic view of Ecclesiastes?

the catholic side

St. Jerome (345-420 CE) whose Latin translation of the Bible formed the lion’s share of the Church’s official Vulgate in the 5^th c. writes about the relative transparency of his translation process from Palestine in 388:

I remember that, about five years ago, when I was still living at Rome, I read Ecclesiastes to the saintly Blesilla, Daughter of Paula, so that I might provoke her to the contempt of this earthly scene, and to count as nothing all that she saw in the world…She was withdrawn from us by her sudden death…and, therefore,…I kept silence under the stroke of such a wound. But now, living as I do in the smaller community of Bethlehem, I pay what I owe to her memory and to you.

I would only point out this, that I have followed no one’s authority. I have translated direct from the Hebrew, adapting my words as much as possible to the form of the Septuagint [Old Testament in Greek, 2^nd c. BCE], but only in those places in which they did not diverge far from the Hebrew. I have occasionally referred also to the versions of Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion, [Jewish translators of Old Testament into later 2^nd c. CE Greek] but so as not to alarm the zealous student by too many novelties, nor yet to let my commentary follow the side streams of opinion, turning aside, against my conscientious conviction, from the fountainhead of truth.

—St. Jerome, Preface to the Commentary on Ecclesiastes. Addressed to Paula and Eustochium, Bethlehem, a.d. 388.

NPNF2-06. Jerome: The Principal Works of St. Jerome, edited by Schaff, Philip (1819-1893). Public Domain.

Christian Classics Ethereal Library. http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf206.vii.ii.vi.html

St. Jerome’s Preface to Ecclesiastes, 388 CE

Expositio in Ecclesiasten ad Paulam et Eustochium. f. 6. Greek writing in lines 13, 15,
16 and 24, with transliteration written above. Initials. Parchment 259 x 181.
29 long lines, ruled in drypoint, prickings visible. Modern vellum.

Monastery of Saint-Martin of Tournai;
bought 1897 by G. Dunn; his sale (1913) to Leighton.
Obtained by Wilberforce Eames for his library (Brooklyn, NY) from W. M. Voynich.
Bequeathed by Eames in 1940.
De Ricci, 2313. De Ricci, Supplement, 329.
New York, New York Public Library,
Manuscripts and Archives Division. NYPL MA 129.
Courtesy of New York Public Library.

References to prior Jewish translators Aquila, Symmachus and Theodotion occur mid-page by transliterated scribblings.

Jerome acknowledges that he wanted to provoke the fragile daughter of his friend, Blesilla, to worldly contempt and to assure her that this visible mortal world was nothing. Which sounds like mild doctrinal agenda. Blue (low) alert. But thereafter, he describes a careful, thoughtful, almost rabbinical process begun in Bethlehem. He bypasses the Greek translations and goes directly to Hebrew sources. He consults the then-500-year-old Septuagint whose canonical authority he abides by. He even updates the older Greek version by checking in with more recent Judaic translators. He is aware of the temptation to translate from personal opinion, and describes a rigorous attempt to stay true to the Hebrew source.

For what it’s worth, when I read the Latin of the Vulgate, I am struck by its pragmatic clarity, not its august poetic presence as with King James’ Bible. The Vulgate I experience is literary only in the sense that it is language at work. Hard at work, to transfer imagery, concepts and underlying frames of reference with integrity, efficiency and lucidity. Only very occasionally, does a translated phrase swell beyond its original duration. As anyone who as ever translated knows, this takes discipline on the part of the translator. The Vulgate’s achievement is its fidelity to its source. It rendered information available to a Western populace who spoke neither Hebrew, Aramaic nor Greek, but were primed for conversion to Christianity. Primed at the very least by the evidence of its sweeping political power. Ostrogoths and Visigoths. Vandals, Jutes, Angles and Saxons. Burgundians, Alemanni, and Franks. Theodosius I declared Christianity the religion of the Roman state in 380 CE. Pope Damasus I commissioned Jerome to revise existing Latin translations in 382. Evangelism was best served by austere adherence to the source. No fluff. No added agenda. The translator didn’t want to “alarm the zealous student.”

Thanks to Jerome’s neutrality we don’t know whether he saw Ecclesiastes as positive or negative. Our only clue occurs outside the translation in this 388 CE preface: his desire to provoke the frail nymph Blesilla “to contempt of this earthly scene.” Which suggests that he saw Ecclesiastes as negative. Contempt-uous.

St. Jerome in His Study

by Albrecht Dürer.

Engraving, 1514

Public Domain.

From the Web Gallery of Art

www.wga.hu

The Web Gallery of Art is a virtual museum and searchable database of European painting and sculpture from 12th to mid-19th centuries. It was started in 1996 as a topical site of the Renaissance art, originated in the Italian city-states of the 14th century and spread to other countries in the 15th and 16th centuries. Intending to present Renaissance art as comprehensively as possible, the scope of the collection was later extended to show its Medieval roots as well as its evolution to Baroque and Rococo via Mannerism. More recently the periods of Neoclassicism and Romanticism were also included.

The collection has some of the characteristics of a virtual museum. The experience of the visitors is enhanced by guided tours helping to understand the artistic and historical relationship between different works and artists, by period music of choice in the background and a free postcard service. At the same time the collection serves the visitors’ need for a site where various information on art, artists and history can be found together with corresponding pictorial illustrations. Although not a conventional one, the collection is a searchable database supplemented by a glossary containing articles on art terms, relevant historical events, personages, cities, museums and churches…

By contrast, Augustine’s (354-430 CE) exegesis, “What Solomon, in the Book of Ecclesiastes, Says Regarding the Things Which Happen Alike to Good and Wicked Men,” does let his “commentary follow the side strains of opinion.” And his opinions lead him past the thorns of vanity into the thicket of balanced antithesis: wisdom vs. folly, light vs. darkness, good vs. bad, righteous vs. wicked, verity vs. vanity, but he lets the positive “excel.” We have a glimmer of positive interpretation:

Solomon, the wisest king of Israel, who reigned in Jerusalem, thus commences the book called Ecclesiastes, which the Jews number among their canonical Scriptures: “Vanity of vanities, said Ecclesiastes, vanity of vanities; all is vanity. What profit hath a man of all his labor which he hath taken under the sun?” [Eccles. i. 2. 3]

And after going on to enumerate…the calamities and delusions of this life, and the shifting nature of the present time, in which there is nothing substantial, nothing lasting, he bewails…that though wisdom excelleth folly as light excelleth darkness, and though the eyes of the wise man are in his head, while the fool walketh in darkness, [Eccles. ii. 13, 14] yet one event happeneth to them all…in this life under the sun, unquestionably alluding to those evils which we see befall good and bad men alike.

He says, further, that the good suffer the ills of life as if they were evil doers, and the bad enjoy the good of life as if they were good. “There is a vanity which is done upon the earth; that there be just men unto whom it happeneth according to the work of the wicked: again, there be wicked men, to whom it happeneth according to the work of the righteous. I said, that this also is vanity.”[Eccles. viii. 14]

This wisest man devoted this whole book to a full exposure of this vanity, evidently with no other object than that we might long for that life in which there is no vanity under the sun, but verity under Him who made the sun. In this vanity, then, was it not by the just and righteous judgment of God that man, made like to vanity, was destined to pass away? But in these days of vanity it makes an important difference whether he resists or yields to the truth, and whether he is destitute of true piety or a partaker of it,—important not so far as regards the acquirement of the blessings or the evasion of the calamities of this transitory and vain life, but in connection with the future judgment which shall make over to good men good things, and to bad men bad things, in permanent, inalienable possession.

—Augustine of Hippo, Chapter 3 “What Solomon, in the Book of Ecclesiastes, Says Regarding the Things Which Happen Alike to Good and Wicked Men,” Book XX, The City of God translated by Marcus Dods (1834-1909). Public Domain. WikiSource, http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_City_of_God/Book_XX/Chapter_3

Augustine calls Qohelet “this wisest man” and lauds his devotion to “full exposure.” Vanity, like man, will be purged by god’s “just and righteous judgment.” Finally he brushes vanity aside for truth. And balances the ensuing antitheses on the truth axis. Resist vs. yield, destitute vs. partaker. Then acquirement vs. evasion, blessings vs. calamities, good vs. bad. Transitory and vain vs. permanent and inalienable.

This is a positive read. He stays close to the source. He sees vanity within a symmetrical context where it is paired with its opposite, truth. The balance of light and dark in Augustine’s interpretation is healthy and even-weighted. But his balance is predicated on the epilog:

Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man.

For God shall bring every work into judgment, with every secret thing, whether it be good, or whether it be evil.

—Eccles. 12:13-14 [KJV]

St. Augustine concludes his chapter on the Book of Ecclesiastes relying on 12:13-14, the only verses that refer to the afterlife and the Day of Judgment—the same verses that are thought to have been added by a later author, because their Pharisaic positing of an afterlife stands in marked contrast to the rest of Qohelet’s writing. If there were no afterlife in Qohelet’s intention, would Augustine still be able to see as much light?

He certainly articulates the Christian view that the mission of the Book of Ecclesiastes is to expose worldly vanity, such that we “might long for that life in which there is no vanity under the sun.” Vanity vs. no vanity.

But my question continues: what if there is no vanity? What if vanity isn’t what Qohelet meant?

the scholar’s side

Mathematician, hornplayer, Texan and rabbinic scholar, Christopher P. Benton comments:

Ecclesiastes is simultaneously one of the most popular and one of the most misunderstood books of the Bible. Too often one hears its key verse, “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity,” interpreted as simply an injunction against being a vain person… However, the original Hebrew, “Havel havelim, hachol havel,” may be better translated as “Futility of futilities, all is futile.”

—Christopher P. Benton, “In Search of Kohelet”, The Maqom Journal for Studies in Rabbinic Literature, Vol. V, (Spring 2003), 1. www.maqom.com/journal/paper9.pdf

Yes.

If hebel habêl or Havel havelim, doesn’t mean vanity, but hollowness, emptiness, meaninglessness, then the balance of light and dark in the Book of Ecclesiastes shifts. The dark is less dark. (Philip reminds me here again of the Buddhist perspective that “form is emptiness; emptiness, form.”)

And if the message to enjoy life is perceived for what it is instead of for what it is not—it is not an affirmation of an afterlife—nor a negation for that matter—doesn’t the exhortation become less wanton, more worshipful? Isn’t then, the light more light?

And if the light is brighter and the dark less doomed, isn’t the balance more equal?

What if the Solomon-like character Qohelet, the Preacher, initially despairs that he cannot understand the meaning of his life? That he has amassed and exercised so much worldly power, but is still none the wiser as to his purpose here on earth? But then, through his very incomprehension, is transported to greater lucidity?

What if he comes to see that powerlessness to comprehend or control his purpose, here, under the sun, is actually a statement of praise for the god who does understand his purpose, his beginning and his end? What if his message to us is: let go and let god? Trust in the wisdom of god?

What if Qohelet is saying:

God is wiser than you. God sees time and purpose where you cannot. To accept what you cannot comprehend is to live wisely. To live wisely is to honor god. To be grateful for god’s gift of your life, your sense of purpose in your work and the pleasure of your senses is to live wisely. If you look for your own meaning, you will not find it and you will miss the meaning that’s already here before you.

Then wouldn’t the double fugue of dark and light mean something else entirely?

It is hard to separate meaning from larger context. The context of the culture in which we live, work and play. The belief sets which live, unspoken, though thoroughly shared, behind the eyes which read the words. Even when subtracting the word “vanity,” can we perceive a less aggressive meaning for hebel habêl?

What happens if we attempt to subtract a subscription to the promise of divine retribution? Even agnosticism and atheism are affected by the spectral “footprint” of the afterlife in modern ethics. The ethical answer to Machiavellian “might makes right” is embedded in the dies iraeretort:

But the meek shall inherit the earth…

—Psalm 37:11, [KJV]

Judgment Day as revenge for all life’s social injustices. Because we can never, in our mortal awareness, know the true outcome, any person can imagine himself or herself vindicated. The idea is too powerful to deny, even by non-believers. Even the Charles Atlas ads aimed at redeeming the 97-pound weakling from humiliation, in this life, trade on the unseen, unsaid example of Salvation, more than the obvious Darwinism of “survival of the fittest.”

So understanding whether Ecclesiastes is pessimistic or optimistic on its own merits, requires our awareness of the filtered lens of worldview through which we study it. And then once we’ve removed our own filter, we must reapply the filter of Qohelet’s own worldview. What is he thinking, what does he know, before he writes the words?

“One of the acclaimed doyens of the study of biblical literature (Garfinkel, Hebrew Studies),” Roland E. Murphy argues that we cannot dismiss the worldview of Israelite sages in our attempts to understand their message. He cites the controversial grandfather of modern Old Testament theology, Gerhard von Rad (1901-1971) who says that for Israel:

The experiences of the world were…divine experiences as well, and the experiences of God were…experiences of the world.

—Gerhard von Rad The Wisdom of Israel (1970), p. 62, as quoted in Roland E. Murphy, The Tree of Life: An Exploration of Biblical Wisdom Literature, (William B. Eerdmans, 1990 & 2002), 114.

There was no separation between nature and god. The grand cycles of nature and the mysterious movement of time, large and small, quotidian and livelong, all affirmed the vast wisdom of god.

A Lutheran pastor and university professor, Gerhard von Rad (1901-1971) became concerned about a rising public sentiment he observed in his native Germany in and around the two world wars, against the Old Testament. In a challenging and personal form of scholarly advocacy, he

inaugurated a new epoch in the study of Old Testament theology. He argued against any [contemporary] organization… along the lines of central concepts, pervasive topics, assumed structures of Israelite thought or world of faith, or systematic theological categories which had been characteristic, in one way or another, of all the theologies of the twentieth century since this was to impose an alien structure on the material.

—John H. Hayes, Professor at Candler School of Theology of the Emory University in Atlanta, 1985 quote. From “Gerhard von Rad”, Wikipedia. Accessed 3/22/09. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerhard_von_Rad

For me, von Rad’s explanation and Hayes’ explanation of von Rad function as reminders for myself of how another aspect of worldview fundamental to early 21^st-c. Western society limits my own full perception of Qohelet’s worldview.

Our blind spot locates where we divide science, technology and empirical observation from god, spirituality and the magic of creativity into two very well-balanced right brain/left brain halves. This division is itself a belief set. That the words technology and spirituality were not in use in the early 20^th century with the commanding connotation they emit today, is a case in point. Edison’s light bulb was a curio, not an “important technological advance.” He would never have considered such terminology. Instead “technology” meant “craft,” “artfulness” or “skill” while “spirituality” meant “discorporealization,” “immaterialism” or “ghostliness.”

Because we divide our lives this way conceptually, we imagine that during those eras when they didn’t, there was no “technology” as such. Untrue, or at best a narrow-minded view of the past. Instead we should realize why we need to make such a symmetrical oversimplification. We are motivated to attempt containment of what we call “technology” under that rubric, just because it threatens to engulf us.

At some point we may come to understand that there can be a relaxation. Technology can inherit mystery while spirituality can make peace with empiricism. Neither need negate the other.

Back to Ecclesiastes.

Similarly, Qohelet’s dualistic structures can be seen as devices for questioning rather than assertions. Life can be “meaningless” but that might encourage us to seek meaning. Or to realize that meaninglessness is not what its seems.

Murphy goes on to say:

Trust in the Lord did not eliminate a lively respect for the mystery of divine activity. The teachings of the sages were open to experience and verification—up to a certain point. Beyond that lay the mystery of God’s free activity…The basic paradox of wisdom appears: on the one hand, wisdom is something acquired by discipline and docility, but on the other hand, it is a gift of God…Although von Rad claimed that Qoheleth had lost the trust that characterized traditional wisdom, one may wonder if he ultimately had a deeper faith than those who “trusted.”

—Murphy, Tree of Life (1990), 114-115.

the feminist poststructuralist side

More overt support for my postulated balance of light and dark comes from feminist poststructuralist biblical critic Jennifer L. Koosed, whose 2006 book (Per)mutations of Qohelet: Reading the Body in the Book examines his contradictions from the perspective of the gendered physical "self." Koosed goes right to the heart of my concern about the time poem’s representativeness, explaining:

Qohelet 3:1-8 may be the most widely known biblical passage in the English-speaking world. One reason for its popularity in such diverse contexts is the underlying eroticism in the passage as well as the way it compels desire. It does, in fact, begin with a word of desire: "For every time there is a season, for every desire (hepes) under heaven" (3:1)

—Jennifer L. Koosed, (Per)mutations of Qohelet: Reading the Body in the Book

(Continuum International Publishing Group, 2006), 68.

She moves on to list the poem’s polar couplets commenting that they exemplify

the movement back and forth between contrasting poles that takes place throughout Qohelet.

Koosed, 2006, 68.

She quotes Georges Bataille and Jacques Derrida about the desire produced by an insoluble dialectic. She passes from sexuality to the duality of breathing, in and out, and the heartbeat, on and off, concluding

The life of the book of Qohelet hangs on 3:1-8; it is its center (heart) and its life-rhythm

Koosed, 2006, 67.

Koosed also mentions the work of colleague Athalya Brenner who suggests that 3:1-8 be interpreted as a "’male poem of desire’" finding the casting of stones in 3:5 to be ejaculatory. Brenner looks at historic interpretations and is able to lump them into two heaps: a larger pessimistic pile and a lesser optimistic pile. Brenner says 3:1-8 is neither, but isolates the poem from the rest of the book, as being the result of earlier authorship, as does male biblical critic James L. Crenshaw.

Athalya Brenner,
Professor Emeritus,
Hebrew Bible/Old Testament,
Universiteit van Amsterdam

This is not reassuring.

But Koosed’s rejection of Brenner’s view restores me, as does her balanced reaction to the hebel theme—which she does not seem to translate as “vanity.” Instead she responds in balanced couplets of her own:

Is Qohelet ultimately pessimistic, despairing of everything in the midst of having everything?

Or is Qohelet ultimately optimistic, advocating an enjoyment of life in the face of meaninglessness?

Koosed, 2006, 63.

She cites Roland Barthes: "’the text, its reading, are split.’"(from Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, 31). Her choices all indicate that she perceives an even balance between light and dark.

By which I am encouraged.

preacher of joy?

Perhaps the greatest support for my search comes from British biblical scholar R. N. Whybray’s groundbreaking 1982 article “Qoheleth, Preacher of Joy” cited by Koosed, Crenshaw and Murphy. Like his title, Whybray opens provocatively:

Qoholeth is generally regarded as having taken a very somber view of life. The seven passages where he recommends the whole-hearted pursuit of enjoyment, therefore, constitute a problem.

—R. N. Whybray, Department of Theology, University of Hull, “Qoheleth, Preacher of Joy”, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 1982, (Sage, 1982),Vol. 7, 87. Used by permission.

Whybray identifies these seven instances as:

1.      There is no better thing for a man to do than eat and drink and find enjoyment in his toil.

—Eccles. 2:24a [Whybray]

2.      So I realized that there is no better thing for them to do than to be happy and enjoy themselves as long as they live.

—Eccles. 3:12 [Whybray]

3.      So I understood that there is no better thing than that a man should be happy in his work.

—Eccles. 3:22a [Whybray]

4.      Take note of what I have discovered: it is good and right to eat and drink and find enjoyment in one’s toil.

—Eccles. 5:17 [Whybray] (5:18 in all my bible versions)

5.      So I praise joy: for there is no better thing for a man to do under the sun than to eat and drink.

—Eccles. 8:15a [Whybray]

6.      Go, eat your bread with joy…, drink your wine with a cheerful heart…Always be dressed in white…Do not fail to anoint your head with oil…Enjoy life with the woman you love.

 —Eccles. 9:7a, 8, 9a [Whybray]

7.     Be happy, young man, in the time of your youth, and let your heart be cheerful while your youth lasts…; follow the promptings of your heart…Banish worry…; cast off trouble…Remember your Creator…

—Eccles. 11:9a, 10a; 12:1a [Whybray]

Attaching each to a context, he shows how each is a solution to a “problem” stated by Qohelet.

In these seven sections of the book, then, Qoheleth posed seven problems of human life and drew practical and positive conclusions concerning the proper conduct of life. The problems are:

1.      The vanity of toil and human effort (1:12-2:26).

2.      The vanity of man’s ignorance of the future (3:1-15).

3.      The vanity of the presence of injustice in the world (3:16-22).

4.      The vanity of the pursuit of wealth (5:9-19).

5.      The vanity of unpunished wickedness (8:10-15).

6.      The vanity of the fact that all men share a common fate (9:1-10).

7.      The vanity of the brevity of human life (1 1:7-12:7).

—Whybray, 1982, 91-92.

Whybray says Qohelet emphasized the vanities “so strongly that he has been supposed to be a teacher of unrelieved pessimism.” Instead, he says, Qohelet is showing how to “transcend the evils which the Creator has inscrutably allowed to exist in the world.” Whybray sums up Qohelet’s teachings:

1.      What good things God has given us are intended for our enjoyment, and in the giving of them he has shown his approval of our actions. To enjoy them is actually to do his will.

2.      We must accept our ignorance of God’s purposes and of the reasons why he has permitted evil to exist in the world; and we must take life as we find it and enjoy what we can, because

a.      we cannot change the fate which God has chosen for us;

b.      we cannot know what God has in store for us;

c.      life is short and death inevitable.

3.      The recognition that toil is part of what God has allotted to us in this life, and that reliance on our own efforts is vain, enables us to find enjoyment even in our toil.

… Qoheleth, without a doubt, consistently expressed the view that human life is “a sorry business” (1:13) and that it is “vanity”. However, he regarded this not as a contradiction of his positive teaching but as actually providing support for it.

—Whybray, 1982, 91-92.

Very, very positive. Do we believe him? Do you? Do I? I don’t know yet.

But I have to root Whybray’s sevens in the medieval Midrash Qohelet (9^th c. CE), one of the earliest rabbinical exegeses we have in original manuscript:

Solomon [as Qohelet] used the word ‘vanity’ seven times, to correspond with the seven stages which man goes through.

1.      In his infancy he is like a king, fondled, kissed, and made much of.

2.      At the age of two or three years he is more like a pig rolling in the mud, etc.

3.      When about ten years of age he is somewhat like a little kid, jumping about and skipping.

4.      About the age of twenty he resembles the wild horse in his lusts and desires.

5.      When married he is not unlike the ass in his dulness and cheerlessness and sleepiness.

6.      Becoming a parent, he becomes bold like the dog in his anxiety to obtain sustenance for his family.

7.      And in his old age, with his furrows and wrinkles, he is not unlike an ape

—Tales and Maxims from the Midrash extracted and translated by Rev. Samuel Rapaport, Late Rabbi of Port Elizabeth and Eastern District of Cape Colony (1907), 178. Scanned at sacred-texts.com, January 2003. J.B. Hare redactor. This text is in the public domain. This file may be used for any non-commercial purpose, provided this notice of attribution is left intact.

King. Pig. Kid, in the sense of young goat. Lusty, unbroken stallion. Beast of burden, ass. Dog. Ape. Wow. Positive interpretation? I’m not sure. Depends on what you think of each animal. Sounds like the king, kid, wild horse and dog phases are ok. The pig could be fun, if unclean. But the dull ass and the wrinkled ape sound like no fun at all.

ROMANESQUE SCULPTOR, Italian (active 1196-1216). Frieze (detail). Stone. Baptistry, Parma. The picture shows part of the frieze on the exterior of the Parma baptistery: two centaur-archers (male and female). Public domain. Web Gallery of Art. www.wga.hu

Midrashim are compilations of exegetical and homiletic commentaries on canonical biblical writings. They contribute to the vast living body of ongoing Jewish hermeneutical endeavor. This manuscript represents a 13^th-c. rabbinical discussion of Qohelet’s ideas:

Thirteenth-century Kohelet Rabbah manuscript from Cairo Geniza (1906 Jewish Encyclopedia).

Ecclesiastes Rabbah or Kohelet Rabbah (tlhq hbd) is an haggadic commentary on Ecclesiastes, included in the collection of the Midrash Rabbot. It follows the Biblical book verse by verse, only a few verses remaining without comment. In the list of the old sedarim for the Bible four sedarim are assigned to Ecclesiastes, namely, to i. 1, iii. 13, vii. 1, and ix. 7; and the Midrash Kohelet was probably divided according to these sections. This appears from the phrase "Sidra tinyana" inserted between the comments to Eccl. vi. 12 and to vii. 1, and the phrase "Sidra telita’a" between the comments to Eccl. ix. 6 and to ix. 7. These phrases occur at the end of the second and third midrash sections, in the same way that "Selik sidra" indicates the end of sections in Ruth R. and Esth. R. in the earlier editions. The commentary to iii. 12 having been lost, the exposition of the conclusion of the first section is missing. Nothing remains to indicate where one section ends and another begins, as there is no introductory remark to the comment on ii. 13. But an introduction is also lacking to the comment on vii. 1 and ix. 7.

Adaptations from Earlier Midrashim

The author confined himself chiefly to collecting and editing, and did not compose new introductions to the sections. He, dated between the sixth and eight centuries however, used to a great extent the introductions which he found either in the earlier midrashim—Bereshit (Genesis) Rabbah, Pesikta, Ekah (Lamentations) Rabbati, Wayikra (Leviticus) Rabbah, Shir ha-Shirim (Canticles) Rabbah—or in the collections from which those midrashim were compiled. This shows the important part which the introductions to the earlier midrashim played in the later midrashim, in that they served either as sources or as component parts of the latter. For introductions to commentaries on the Bible text and for homilies on the sedarim and Pesikta cycle, it was customary to choose texts occurring not in the Pentateuch, but chiefly in the Hagiographa, including Ecclesiastes. This, even in very early times, gave rise to a haggadic treatment of numerous passages in Ecclesiastes, which in turn furnished rich material for the compilation of the Midrash Kohelet.

The longest passages in the Midrash Kohelet are the introductions to Pesikta and Wayikra Rabbah, all of which the author used. Some introductions were abbreviated, and introductions from different midrashim were combined in a comment on one passage of Ecclesiastes. For instance, the long passage on Eccl. xii. 1-7 is a combination of the introduction to Wayikra Rabbah xviii. 1 and the twenty-third introduction in Ekah Rabbati (ed. S. Buber, pp. 9a-12a). Of the 96 columns which the Midrash Kohelet contains in the Venice edition (fols. 66c-90b), nearly twenty are occupied by expositions which the author took from introductions in Bereshit Rabbah, Pesikta, Wayikra Rabbah, and Shir ha-Shirim Rabbah; namely, the comments to Eccl. i. 1, 3, 5, 18; ii. 2, 12b, 21, 23; iii. 1, 11, 15, 16; v. 4, 5, 8, 15; vi. 7; vii. 14, 23 et seq.; viii. 1; ix. 2, 15; x. 20; xi. 2, 6; xii. 1-7. Many other passages besides the introductions have been transferred from those sources to the Midrash Kohelet. Moreover, it contains several passages in common with Ruth R.; compare especially the comment on Eccl. vii.8, which includes the story of R. Meïr and his teacher Elisha b. Abuya, with Ruth Rabbah vi. (to Book of Ruth iii. 13), with which it agrees almost verbatim. In this case the story was not taken direct from its source in Yer. Hag. ii. 77b, c.

Passages from the Babylonian Talmud

The author of the Midrash Kohelet of course frequently consulted the aggadah of the Jerusalem Talmud. At the same time, it may be assumed that various passages were taken directly from the Babylonian Talmud; and this assumption would prove the relatively later date of Kohelet Rabbah, though the end of the midrash, which is taken from Hag. 5a, must be considered as an addition.

A further characteristic indication of the late composition of the work is the fact that in the comments on Eccl. v. 5 and vii. 11 passages from Pirke Abot are quoted, with a reference to this treatise (comp. Wayikra R. xvi.), and in the comment on v. 8 several smaller treatises are mentioned. In the same comment on v. 8, at the beginning of a proem in Wayikra Rabbah xxii., a modification of the passage in the latter is made which gives ample proof that the Midrash Kohelet was written at a later time than the other midrashic works mentioned. In Wayikra Rabbah the passage reads: "Even what is superfluous on the earth is a part of the whole; and also the things which thou regardest as superfluous to the revealed Torah, as the prescriptions relating to fringes, phylacteries, and mezuzah, they also belong to the idea of the revealed Torah." In the Midrash Kohelet it reads: "The things which thou regardest as superfluous to the Torah, as the tosafot of Rebbi’s school and those of R. Nathan and the treatise on proselytes and slaves ["Hilkot Gerim wa-'Abadim"], they also were revealed to Moses on Mt. Sinai, and treatises like ‘Hilkot Zizit Tefillin u-Mezuzot’ belong to the sum total of the Torah."

As Zunz assumes (G. V. p. 266), the Midrash Kohelet belongs to the time of the middle midrashim. On the other hand, the author of Midrash Kohelet must not be charged with "proceeding entirely in the spirit of later compilers" merely because, in connection with certain Bible texts, he repeats accepted or approved passages which were written upon the same or similar texts. Such repetitions are frequently found in the earlier midrashim. In Midrash Kohelet the same comments are found on Eccl. i. 2 as on vi. 12; on i. 3 as on xi. 9; on i. 13 as on iii. 10; on iii. 16 as on x. 4; on vi. 1 as on ix. 13; and on vii. 11 as on ix. 10; etc. Verses ii. 24, iii. 13, v. 17, viii. 15 receive the same explanation; and it is interesting to note that the Epicurean and hedonistic view expressed in them—that for all of man’s troubles his only compensation is the gratification of the senses: eating, drinking, and taking pleasure—is interpreted allegorically and given a religious significance:

Wherever eating and drinking are spoken of in this way, the pleasure is meant which the study of the Bible and the performance of good works afford; as it is written (ch. viii. 15): ‘it accompanies him בעמלו ["in his labor"], which must be interpreted as בעולמו ["in his world"]‘: not eating and drinking accompany man to the grave, but the Torah and the good works which he performs.

—“Ecclesiastes Rabbah Wikipedia. Accessed 3/23/09. And Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Kohelet_rabbah_manuscript.jpg

so, my question

So, my question, restated:

Is the Book of Ecclesiastes about the futility of this fleeting life, or faith in the mysterious time of god? Or both?

Let me rephrase:

Should I read Qohelet’s message and feel discouraged about the meaninglessness of it all and my helplessness to make sense of my purpose here on earth, or should I feel encouraged to accept, trust and even rejoice in my life no matter what may come?

(If the answer is positive, then my oratorio stands in praise of divine order. If not, my music is one more gray reminder of oncoming death. So what’s it gonna be, Q? I can’t believe you wrote the book as one more gray reminder. And I sure didn’t write the music for that purpose!)

Once more:

Is the Book of Ecclesiastes dark? Or light? Or is it a balance of both? Of dark and light with neither predominant?

—HariHara deity form (Vishnu & Shiva combined)

from a temple in Godrumdwip, West Bengal.

Photo by GourangaUK, 2004.

Released to Public Domain. Wikimedia Commons.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HariHara09.jpg

The entire book is autobiographical, as told by a man in graying middle age, a man who has achieved wealth and power but not the meaning of life. After he outlines his story, preacher Qohelet goes on to counsel his congregation [ecclesia or qoheleth] of readers on how to live this life that has so confounded him.

Threading through the entire book, run two themes: one dark, one light.

At its opening, Ecclesiastes Chapter 1 sets forth the dark invective:

Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.

—Book of Ecclesiastes 1:2, The Holy Bible, containing the Old and New Testaments, Translated out of the Original Tongues and with the Former Translations Diligently Compared and Revised by His Majesty’s Special Command. Authorised King James Version or [KJV]

This trope recurs throughout and does more to cast the book’s character of grim—almost sardonic—admonition than the light theme does to mitigate it.

Qohelet follows the damning, with the world-weary:

What profit hath man of all his labour wherein he laboureth under the sun?

— Keholet (Book of Ecclesiastes)1:3, The Holy Scriptures, According to the Masoretic Text, A New Translation, With the aid of Previous Versions and with constant consultation of Jewish Authorities. Philadelphia, 1917.The Jewish Publication Society of America or [JPS]

Then the sun comes up all of a sudden—a poem about the grand cycles of nature, which I have translated and set to music:

Generations come and go but the earth endures beyond mind.

The sun is risen and set and returned to begin again.

The wind wheels around the zenith—dark north, bright south—and repeats the circle.

Every river runs into the sea but the sea does not fill yet the rivers continue to spring.

All these things are incomprehensible:

we cannot fully behold them nor consider their extent.

Whatever was before is what will be again; nothing is new.

There is no memory of former things.

There will be no recollection after this.

Every thing you’ve done will be done again

by someone who thinks it’s the first time.

—Eccles. 1:4-9,11, 10 [KB]

To which I attach a portion of a verse from Chapter 3 to close the poem:

Only god knows the beginning and ending of all things.

—Eccles. 3:11b [KB]

Qohelet instead begins his autobiography:

I the Preacher was king over Israel in Jerusalem.

And I gave my heart to seek and to search out by wisdom concerning all things that are done under heaven; it is a sore travail that God hath given to the sons of men to be exercised therewith.

I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and, behold, all is vanity and a vexation of the spirit.

—Eccles. 1:12-15 [KJV]

Vexed, and in vain. All.

In Chapter 2, a darkening portrait of the narrator’s frustration emerges:

I said to myself, "Come now, I will make a test of pleasure; enjoy yourself." But behold, this also was vanity.

—Eccles. 2:1, The Holy Bible, Revised Standard Version of the American Standard Version translated from the original tongues, being the version set forth A.D. 1611, revised A.D. 1881-1885 and A.D. 1901, compared with the most ancient authorities and revised A.D. 1952 or [RSV]

Then I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought, and on the labor that I had labored to do:

and, behold, all was vanity and vexation of spirit, and there was no profit under the sun.

—Eccles. 2:11 [KJV]

Then said I in my heart, As it happeneth to the fool, so it happeneth even to me; and why was I then more wise? Then I said in my heart, that this also is vanity.

—Eccles. 2:15 [KJV]

Humor, pleasure, just vanity. All his work, just vanity. And he is no better than a fool; his wisdom, just vanity.

But towards the end of Chapter 2, another insight brightens:

There is nothing better for a man, than that he should eat and drink, and that he should make his soul good in his labor. This also I saw, that it was from the hand of God.

—Eccles. 2:24 [KJV]

and brighter:

For God giveth to a man that is good in his sight wisdom, and knowledge, and joy…

—Eccles. 2: 26 [KJV]

but he doesn’t let up and within the same sentence, closes the chapter nevertheless:

…This also is vanity and vexation of spirit.

—Eccles. 2: 26 [KJV]

Chapter 3 opens with the brilliance of the famous time poem:

To every thing there is a season and a time to every purpose under heaven:

A time to be born, and a time to die;
a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;

A time to kill, and a time to heal;
a time to break down, and a time to build up;

A time to weep, and a time to laugh;
a time to mourn, and a time to dance;

A time to cast away to stones, and a time to gather stones together;
a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing.

A time to get, and a time to lose;
a time to keep, and a time to cast away;

A time to rend, and a time to sew;
a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;

A time to love, and a time to hate;
a time of war, and a time of peace.

—Eccles. 3:1-8 [KJV]

Which I set to music, closing out with 3:15a from a few verses down:

That which has been, is now; and that which is to be has already been.

—Eccles. 3:15a [KB]

Qohelet follows the time poem with the softer counter-theme, begun the chapter before:

I know that there is no good…but for a man to rejoice, and to do good in his life.

And also that every man should eat and drink, and enjoy the good of all his labor, it is the gift of God.

—Eccles. 3:12-13 [KJV]

interweaving the darker:

For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts…:

as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath;

so that a man hath no preeminence above a beast: for all is vanity.

—Eccles. 3:19 [KJV]

Hard-assed. And Chapter 4, even darker:

Wherefore I praised the dead which are already dead

more than the living which are yet alive.

Yea, better is he than both they, which hath not yet been,

who hath not seen the evil work that is done under the sun.

—Eccles. 4:2-3 [KJV]

Better to be dead than alive. Better yet to be unborn. Sounds like a suicide note. And the chapter ends with the trope:

Surely this also is vanity and vexation of spirit.

—Eccles. 4:16 [KJV]

Chapter 5 cautions against dreaming and financial ambition:

For in the multitude of dreams and many words there are also divers vanities…

—Eccles. 5:7 [KJV]

He that loveth silver shall not be satisfied with silver;

nor he that loveth abundance with increase: this is also vanity.

—Eccles. 5:10 [KJV]

But again he tempers the pessimism by reiterating that “it is good and comely” to eat, drink and enjoy the fruits of one’s labor as the gift of God

because God answereth him in the joy of his heart.

—Eccles. 5:20 [KJV]

Chapter 6 names further evil under the sun as getting everything you want and then not enjoying it:

A man to whom God hath given riches, wealth, and honor,

so that he wanteth nothing for his soul of all that he desireth,

yet God giveth him not power to eat thereof… this is vanity…

—Eccles. 6:2 [KJV]

And after giving this same man a hundred children and a good old age of a thousand years twice told, he is still no better off than one of untimely birth.

For he cometh in with vanity, and departeth in darkness…

Moreover he hath not seen the sun, nor known any thing

Better is the sight of the eyes than the wandering of the desire: this is also vanity and vexation of spirit.

—Eccles. 6:4-5, 9 [KJV]

Vanity is impossible to avoid.

Seeing there be many things that increase vanity, what is man the better?

—Eccles. 6:11 [KJV]

Indeed.

Chapter 7 is more aphoristic to start, like 3, which changes the rhythm of the prose. Like going from a flowing compound meter to a cut-time march. Less of the ubiquitous “vanity” and more “wisdom” from this point on. But here’s one that does mention it:

It is better to hear the rebuke of the wise, than for a man to hear the song of fools.

For as the crackling of thorns under a pot, so is the laughter of the fool: this also is vanity.

—Eccles. 7:5-6 [KJV]

The wise and the fool do battle for our souls. Then the advice gets a bit amoral:

All things have I seen in the days of my vanity: there is a just man that perisheth in his righteousness,

and there is a wicked man that prolongeth his life in his wickedness.

Be not righteous over much; neither make thyself over wise: why shouldest thou destroy thyself?

Be not over much wicked, neither be thou foolish: why shouldest thou die before thy time?

—Eccles. 7:15-17 [KJV]

And the chapter closes with some scary misogynist remarks that I will forgo—not feeling as sympathetic to Qohelet’s broken heart as his male exegetists —about a woman “whose heart is snares and nets, and her hands are as bands.” On my terms, I could be that woman with snare drums in my heart and band-members on my hands, but I know that’s not what Qohelet meant. Apparently we women weren’t included in any of his recommendations for living. Damn. I put myself in anyhow.

Chapter 8 speaks of wisdom more fully, vanity is mentioned and again he recommends that we “eat…drink, and…be merry.” The message is recycled from earlier chapters but darkened further by increased warnings that we cannot know the future.

I’ll move on to 9. In every chapter so far, the narrator has followed the condemnatory “vanity” statements with the exhortation to enjoy life in the present. The brighter carpe diem theme is the most explicit here in Chapter 9. We all die, the clean, the unclean, the righteous, the wicked—

But to him that is joined to all the living there is hope: for a living dog is better than a dead lion.

[interesting way to countermand the “suicide note” in Ch. 4]

For the living know that they shall die: but the dead know not any thing,

neither have they any more a reward; for the memory of them is forgotten.

[please note express non-adherence to concepts afterlife or future retribution, i.e. day of judgment]

—Eccles. 9:4-5 [KJV & RSV]

Go thy way, eat thy bread with joy, and drink thy wine with a merry heart…

Let thy garments be always white; and let thy head lack no ointment.

Live joyfully with the wife whom thou lovest…

Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might;

for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest.

—Eccles. 9:7-10 [KJV]

Chapters 10 and 11 are aphoristic and brief again. Gorgeous punchy one-liners, often tinged by riddle. The random battle between wisdom and folly wages on:

Dead flies make the perfumer’s ointment give off a stinking savor:

so, a little folly outweighs wisdom and honor.

—Eccles. 10:1-2 [KJV & RSV]

If the iron is blunt, and one does not whet the edge,

then he must put forth more strength: but wisdom helps one to succeed.

—Eccles. 10:10 [RSV]

Through sloth the roof sinks in, and through indolence the house leaks.

—Eccles. 10:18 [RSV]

A feast is made for laughter, and wine maketh merry: but money answereth all things.

—Eccles. 10:19 [KJV]

Cast thy bread upon the waters: for thou shalt find it after many days.

—Eccles. 11:1 [KJV]

He that observeth the wind shall not sow; and he that regardeth the clouds shall not reap.

—Eccles. 11:4 [KJV]

Truly the light is sweet and a pleasant thing it is for the eyes to behold the sun:

But if a man live many years, and rejoice in them all;

yet let him remember the days of darkness;

for they shall be many. All that cometh is vanity.

—Eccles. 11:7 [KJV]

Rejoice, O young man, in thy youth; and let thy heart cheer thee…

and walk in the ways of thine heart, and in the sight of thine eyes:

but know thou, that for all these things God will bring thee into judgment.

—Eccles. 11:9 [KJV] (please note allusion to retribution—but is it in this life or the next?)

Therefore remove sorrow from thy heart, and put away evil from thy flesh:

for childhood and youth are vanity.

—Eccles. 11:10 [KJV]

There is no escaping vanity. Now childhood is vanity. In the verse just before it, growing old happily is vanity. And yet, for all of us, there is the simple pleasure of the sun, the light threading through the dark. Always. A double fugue.

Chapter 12 closes the book. The “vanity” ritornello appears in full, for a last hurrah:

Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth, before the evil days come, and the years draw nigh, when thou shalt say, “I have no pleasure in them”; before the sun, or the light, or the moon, or the stars, be darkened, and the clouds return after the rain…

—Eccles. 12:1-2 [KJV & RSV]

…before the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern, and the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the spirit returns to God who gave it. Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher; all is vanity.

—Eccles. 12:5-8 [KJV & RSV]

Which seems like it should be the end. All is indeed vanity. Even when you remember your creator.

After this, the writer’s voice changes subtly. (Did someone else write it? Everyone I’ve read says yes. Sounds like Hillel. More on that later.) In the last sentences the Preacher is “he” rather than “I”. A clear message of future retribution, never explicit before in this book, suddenly emerges, as if it had been there all along:

Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man.

For God shall bring every work into judgment, with every secret thing,

whether it be good, or whether it be evil.

—Eccles. 12:13-14 [KJV]

And that’s a short look at the big little book of Ecclesiastes.

The biblical words of the sage Qohelet in his book Ecclesiastes, have been read many different ways. The enigma he himself embedded over two millennia ago persists provocatively. Each time the interpretation says more about the interpreter than the interpreted. Yet each time some new facet of the truth is revealed. Like all his interpreters, I am driven by the conviction, that I’m the one he will choose to reveal himself to, fully.

I am no theologian. I just wanted to set his words to music, as many have done before me. From 2001, before the attack on the World Trade Center, until now, I have been working on ecclesiastes: a modern oratorio, in which I set passages about the divine, inscrutable order of time. The world has changed, my life has changed and my understanding of those words has changed—all three quite dramatically—since I began. Sifting down through the Latin avatar to the Hebrew roots, I’ve come to an intuitive musical understanding, which I explain in an essay burned onto the CD itself, hearing ecclesiastes: expressing Qohelet’s ideas with music. But I continue to question. So in this essay, I explore the beliefs behind the words, as well as the belief systems that have affected various translations and interpretations, mine and others. All in an attempt to come to understand what Qohelet meant in the original written word.

Because I’m a musician, most of my work plays out in the present. Even so, I have always loved trying to imagine the music of the past. How it was made. How it was heard. What people were thinking. The problem is that reliable documentation of music only goes back a century or so in audio, a millennium or so in writing, and before that our guesses get so thick, they may as well be fantasy—we honestly have no idea what music sounded like.

Not so with words.

The words of Ecclesiastes have led me to study the words of the Torah, Tanakh and Talmud, to explore the history of the Jews and the linguistic and cultural influences of a succession of oppressors—Egyptian, Babylonian, Persian, Greek and Roman. And I am coming to understand what role those non-Judaic cultures played in the branching-off of Christianity and its successive Bibles—Septuagint, Vulgate, King James and American Revised—as well as tensions within Judaism: the Houses of Hillel and Shammai, the Sadducees, Pharisees and Essenes.

The words of Ecclesiastes pushed me to examine the words of Jewish wise men, Greek philosophers, Babylonian poets, and Egyptian scribal sages. Also that of emblematic characters like Pythagoras, King Solomon, Sumerian Shuruppak—last king before the flood—and the murdered pharaoh Amenemotep, who had beautiful ideas attributed to them in name like offerings at a shrine. Challenging the premises of originality and ideological ownership. Living ideas. Ideas agelessly relevant to modern life. Sensory pleasure, moral duty, justice, retribution. Afterlife, pantheism. Cycles of time.

The words of Ecclesiastes have motivated me to read the words of generations since. To feel how the thinking around the thinking has moved in whorls of contradiction and interpretation. How my thinking has been affected by precedent events of which I had no direct experience or consciousness. Even my ignorance of the subject when I first began I’ve learned is the product of the stellar pull of past intellectual motion. As well as my growing sense of illumination and understanding of the history of thinking. The birth of cultural anthropology in the late 19^th c. Philology before that. The medieval love of system. The desperate drive to preserve knowledge in Europe’s Dark Ages. Christianity’s justification of paganism. Judaism’s self-defense.

The words of Ecclesiastes drew me into words from the ancient Near Eastern world of Wisdom. Older than Ecclesiastes. Older than the Bible. Older than Greek philosophy. Roots of our thoughts, five thousand years deep. Treasured advice for living. Richly set like verbal gemstones in poetry, riddle, proverb, rhythmic enumeration, melodic allegory, riveting biographies of the long dead alive with sex, murder, gold and personal shame. Sage and scribe as witnesses, portraitists and prophets. Their craft well-practiced and well-paid. Thank god(s) for the vanity of those who paid them—for their desire to live beyond death—in words.

Bright, slight, effervescent and roguishly astute, thirty-something ex-pat Texan Greer Taylor came to Boston to clerk for my reserved Brahmin grandfather’s law firm in the latter-day 1940s post-world-war. Adoring my Yankee grandfather’s deft thrift of wit and word, Greer set out to woo his youngest daughter. Unsuccessfully, because in the process he introduced his co-Texan roommate, my father, to her. And Greer left the picture.

Unborn, I was no witness, but I imagine it was then that he reevaluated his sexuality and career. By the time I was christened his goddaughter, he was in his final year at Episcopal Theological Seminary in Cambridge. Brilliant, with a jurist’s diamond-cutting critical insight, he taught Christian ethics and the philosophy of religion at a series of divinity schools but he was always terminated for his enthusiastic participation in Bacchic student escapades.

Greer ended up in Cuernavaca, Mexico, in a vertical home carved out of the rock of a hillside. Three stories, one or two small rooms each, walls two feet thick of solid craggy rock, it had belonged to a monastery, or a rectory, a priestly abode. The second floor was open and a massive tree grew out of the middle of the floor and reached to the sky, canopying over the dinner table. Since the temperature neither dropped too far, due to latitude, nor rose too high, due to altitude, Greer’s home offered a beautiful coexistence between man and nature, privacy and contemplation inside a small bustling Mexican city.

There he wrote about the logic of Saint Paul and collaborated with radical educator and Catholic monsignor Ivan Illich (Deschooling Society, 1971) who founded and directed the Centro International de Documentación on the other side of town, a school for monks, nuns, revolutionaries and others interested in blending into Latin American society with persuasive missionary discretion. Greer himself authored “PISTS CRISTOU [PISTIS CHRISTOU, Faith in Christ] in Galatians” (Journal of Biblical Literature 85, 1966, 58-76), still quoted in theological publications today. Here is an example of how he lives on:

It was Greer M. Taylor who recognized the juridical determination of PISTS CRISTOU [faith in Christ] in Gal 3:15 and related it to the distinctive function of PISTS (faith) in both Galatians and Romans on the basis of the Roman legal institution of fidei commissum…
The fidei commissum is a body of law that establishes the provisions for the disposition of inheritance. “It is a device for the distribution of benefits—which include PISTS CRISTOU [faith in Christ] but, also, other benefits which the law does not even claim to offer.”

…Abraham and Christ are the successive testamentary heirs who receive the inheritance in PISTS CRISTOU. As Paul says in Gal 3:16, “The promises were spoken to Abraham and to his seed, who is Christ.” By drawing upon a close reading of the Septuagint text of Gen 12:2, [PISTS CRISTOU], he is able to apply the fidei commissum to Abraham and a single lineal descendant.

lineal descendant n. a person who is in direct line to an ancestor, such as child, grandchild, great-grandchild and on forever. A lineal descendant is distinguished from a “collateral” descendant which would be from the line of a brother, sister, aunt or uncle.

—Herman C. Waetjen, “The trust of Abraham and the trust of Jesus Christ: Romans 1:17,” Currents in Theology and Mission, December 1, 2003. Published by the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, in cooperation with Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary and Wartburg Theological Seminary. Used by permission.

http://www.thefreelibrary.com/The+trust+of+Abraham+and+the+trust+of+Jesus+Christ%3a+Romans+1%3a17.-a0111696786

The issue that Greer argued is central to Protestant negotiation for the quality of afterlife. Saint Paul proposes that faith itself is enough to guarantee salvation through Christ. Saint James disagrees:

What doth it profit, my brethren, though a man say he hath faith,
And have not works? can faith save him?

—James 2:14 [KJV]

James, or Santiago, goes on to articulate the famous Christian viewpoint “faith without works is dead.”

My mother remembers that Greer had entered a joint venture with the rector of St. Paul’s Cathedral in Boston to write a book, Saint Paul: a Study of the Development of His Thought, published by Scribner’s in 1969. The article in 1966 is a vital, preliminary insight into what Greer found so interesting about St. Paul. It’s a pretty hot argument. Do you have to do good? Or are you good enough? Or, tougher, is your faith good enough? Paul’s argument is that good works will proceed automatically from good faith. If they do not and/or you continue to sin, then your faith is flawed, and salvation will not be yours.

In his early writings Paul recommended that Jews continue to read Torah, while Gentiles could be accepted into the faith without reading. For the latter, belief in Christ alone was enough; not even circumcision was required for acceptance into the kingdom of god.

For, as he continues, “It does not say, ‘and to seeds,’ as of many, but as of one;” and, after repeating the text of Gen 12:2, he identifies that one seed as the “Christ.”

“These two persons,” as Taylor asserts, “have exclusive legal title to, and exclusive power to transmit the benefits [of the testament]. And the benefits come as a free gift—without being earned—to beneficiaries of all nations, Jew and Gentile alike, all on the same terms.”

Although Abrabam is the original testamentary heir, Christ as the single descendant is the sole agent of the distribution of its benefits.

—Waetjen, “The Trust of Abraham…”, 2003.

The Paul vs. James argument rages on today. It even underlies the same-sex marriage rift that has split Greer’s Episcopalian Church in the past decade or so.

I don’t know if Greer’s interest in St. Paul foreshadowed this dark era in Christianity. My mother does feel he was tortured by his homosexuality, especially towards the end. And that he may have ended his life in Mexico at the age of fifty-five, intentionally.

Intentionally or not, I believe it was the disease of alcoholism that got him. Whether it rotted his judgment, his keen juridical mind, or his lower body, it doesn’t matter. I miss him.

Greer encouraged me to question. He encouraged my explorations and considered my passionate pronouncements with respectful gravity. When I engaged him in a debate over the existence of god at age eleven, hoping he’d be shocked by my brave, punk atheism, he confided that he wasn’t sure of god’s existence either and I was the one who was shocked. He then gave me a copy of A Clockwork Orange. We continued the debate—my favorite—into my teen years when I went to stay with him in Cuernavaca while studying Spanish at Ivan Illich’s CIDOC.

It was me who gave in and came to believe, long after Greer’s death. Faith comes from question. Mine certainly has. Via my own battle with alcoholism. And so I’ve kept and treasured my godfather’s open invitation to challenge any and all my beliefs at any time. This book is one more rejoinder in our ongoing conversation.

I am no religious believer though and may never be. Faith I have but not religion. I do respect others’ beliefs. Deeply. I believe in belief. And I am fascinated by the phenomenon of human religion. The intricacies of invention and justification. The good can be very good, but I’ve also seen much evil done in the name of religion, and that I cannot pardon. So I take for myself the elements that seem to work, from wherever they manifest, and enjoy the rest from a distance. Greer would have understood.

I still struggle with the idea of the afterlife—I am adamant that it should never be a reason to miss the glorious everydays of this life. And I can’t imagine why someone would die for me whom I never even knew, so that I could enjoy eternity. I don’t want eternity, but I do cling to the idea that Greer can live on. That he can somehow still hear me thinking. For a little longer.

This essay, then, is for you.