Main news for 22 November 2024

So is wisdom valuable? Is there meaning in it? For the earth, earthly wisdom is important in some things. Sometimes it helps. At times it wins in confrontation with brute force. But what does this change? It turns out, fundamentally, nothing. And the point is not even that the poor wise man who saved the city was forgotten. The point is that no wisdom can change a person's fate before the face of eternity. The most terrible thing is that the lot of the sage and the fool, and of all the rest as well, is one. Death. Sheol. The kingdom of shadows, where there is no life. Ecclesiastes knows no other prospect.

It would seem that he has another experience, the experience of that inner peace and rest which a person finds at the boundary of God's eternity and the created world. But even this experience is lived by a person while he is alive. While he is in the realm of the living. And what will remain for him in the realm of the dead? Yahwism does not know the teachings about the afterlife and postmortem retribution that were so well known in antiquity, for example, to Egyptians or Greeks. No fields of Osiris for good people or fields of Set for bad ones. Sheol is one for all. And there is no life in it. There is a certain existence resembling life, but only very remotely.

Somewhat as in summer, during the dry season, a half-dried brook may sometimes remind one of the turbulent stream of water that ran in this same channel only recently, in the rainy season. Remnants of former, full life. Of course, life in the fallen world can hardly be called full, but compared with Sheol even it seems a measure of fullness. And if everything is so, what is the meaning of wisdom? Even the higher wisdom that Ecclesiastes touched when he visited the boundary of God's eternity and the created world?

Yes, this higher wisdom can give a person joy and peace, but only while he is alive. And in Sheol it will disappear just like earthly wisdom. It turns out that higher wisdom is no better than earthly wisdom. And in some ways even worse. A meaningless life is a foolish joke, nothing more. But a life that beckoned with higher meaning, inner peace and joy, and then left a person face to face with Sheol, is a joke not only foolish, but also very cruel. Meaning was near, and then hid again. In the same place where all the living hide: in Sheol.