NOTES for Ecc 12:13-14

The most remarkable thing about the personality of Ecclesiastes is that at the end of the path he became Ecclesiastes. A preacher. And a Preacher with a capital letter. A witness. The word "ecclesiastes" itself, translated from Greek, means "preacher," just like the corresponding Hebrew "Qoheleth," which is the Hebrew name of the Book of Ecclesiastes. The issue is a Temple or synagogue preacher. Ecclesiastes was neither priest nor prophet; the Temple court could hardly have become his platform.

The synagogue was another matter: anyone could preach there. But active synagogue preachers rarely came from the highest aristocracy, to which Ecclesiastes undoubtedly belonged. For a person like Ecclesiastes to become the one remembered by tradition, something unusual must have happened to him. Conversion. Spiritual renewal. Birth from above. What else could he have preached about? The reflections we find in the book could hardly have become the basis for a sermon, especially a synagogue sermon. There is too little hope there, and no answer to the main question: what is the meaning of human life before the face of Sheol?

Without such an answer, being a preacher, God's witness, is impossible, even if one has sufficiently deep personal spiritual experience. And Ecclesiastes seems to have found his answer: the fear of God and His commandments. Of course, here is the quintessence of Ecclesiastes' preaching, an extract made by one of his disciples or followers. But the meaning is evidently conveyed accurately. Of course, the issue is not commandments as a legal or moral code. Before the face of Sheol, morality is as powerless as jurisprudence. The issue is something else: what in the Second Temple era came to be called the inner Torah.

The commandment not as a prescription, but as a spiritual and moral imperative that does not restrict a person from without, but builds his life from within. It might seem that Ecclesiastes' experience of having been at that boundary of silence where God's eternity touches creation has little connection with the Torah, even the inner Torah. But this is only how it seems at first glance. What is a commandment as a spiritual reality? God's will addressed to a person. God's intentions directly entering his soul, as God's word enters the world, changing it. And these intentions remain with the person.

Not only during that sacred dance in which a person participates together with all creation, the dance that Ecclesiastes was able to discern in the eternal circling of the universe, but also when the dance ends and the person leaves the great round dance. The eternity of unceasing movement is replaced by the eternity of rest and takes the form of the inner Torah. This core can stand before the face of Sheol. What comes after, what is there, beyond, in eternity? Ecclesiastes is silent. Perhaps he knows but does not speak. Or it is not in the book. For the book is about something else. It is about the search for the path. And the inner Torah is the path already found. That is another story.

The Book of Ecclesiastes ends with a call to remember the Creator, into whose hands the human spirit departs. Having found neither meaning nor eternity in anything on earth, Ecclesiastes points to God himself as the answer to the human need for both. It is important that, for Ecclesiastes, deliverance from the meaninglessness of existence lies beyond the bounds of earthly life; neither is it to be found in the separation of soul and body after death. Yet the words about the human spirit returning to the God who gave it express a profound hope. In Sheol, which constitutes a person's fate after death, there is neither life nor God. But Ecclesiastes knows, and tells the reader, that descent into Sheol does not exhaust God's purpose for humanity.

The book closes with several lines added by a scribe or editor, repeating Ecclesiastes' final conclusion: the only possible meaning of human life is to walk before God. This conclusion accords with the covenant God made with Abraham; it also accords with the prophets' vision of the way of life: ‘O man, you have been told what is good and what the Lord requires of you: to act justly, to love deeds of mercy and to walk humbly before your God.’

One cannot fail to notice that, compared with the main body of Ecclesiastes, the closing lines seem somewhat out of place. It is not even that the words about Ecclesiastes' wisdom were clearly added by a scribe or editor: the very thought expressed in these verses does not follow from the text of the book. The call to fear God seems to have been inserted to soften the impression left by a frighteningly hopeless text. Yet in the wider biblical context, it is fundamentally important that Ecclesiastes' disillusionment does not spare the religiosity of his own time. In his concluding call to live remembering one's Creator (Eccl. 12:1 ff.), Ecclesiastes says that even remembering God does not abolish death, which separates flesh and spirit. And this passage, apparently speaking of what matters most, also ends with the familiar refrain that all is vanity. This makes Ecclesiastes a book that sums up, first and foremost, the spiritual and religious history of Old Testament humanity. In Ecclesiastes' eyes, the whole depth of Old Testament religion proves almost as lifeless as human worldly existence.

Written in an age of religious indifference that in many ways resembles the modern world, Ecclesiastes is above all a call to take life seriously. Ecclesiastes seeks life's meaning largely because his contemporaries have abandoned that search, contenting themselves with immediate benefits. Moreover, he clearly demonstrates the futility of such narrowness: there is nothing in the world that can satisfy the human soul, and God has given us the gift of eternity so that we may live precisely by that gift.

Ecclesiastes sums up the whole of Old Testament experience, religious and everyday alike, and its conclusion offers little comfort. Ecclesiastes constantly emphasises that, in the face of the futility of all that exists and the inevitability of death, only God himself can fill human life with meaning and goodness. Thus only the Beatitudes can answer all Ecclesiastes' questions and all his sorrow. In them, the Lord Jesus Christ speaks of where humanity is granted that highest good which Ecclesiastes finds unattainable. In the same way, only Christ's Resurrection answers Ecclesiastes' grief over the all-encompassing power of death.

Ecclesiastes' outlook was probably shared by far more than the single author of this book. It is more likely that it reflects the thoughts and feelings of several generations of Israel's sages. Only a few centuries later, this milieu becomes one of the principal audiences of the Good News. Although addressed to all humanity, the Saviour's preaching nevertheless takes place within a particular religious and cultural context. The spiritual heirs of Ecclesiastes hold an important place in it. In this connection, it must be noted that Ecclesiastes, alongside other works of Israel's sages, occupied an important place in the annual cycle of synagogue readings. Taken to its logical limit, Ecclesiastes' scepticism leads directly to the ideology of the Sadducees. By contrast, those who have deeply absorbed his reflections that nothing in earthly life can satisfy a person may rightfully be called those ‘waiting for the consolation of Israel’. Someone who experiences the reality of existence in keeping with Ecclesiastes' thoughts may, in one way or another, be called a ‘field white for harvest’, for their heart is ready to hear the Saviour's answer to their agonising questions.

Of course, everything Qoheleth says about the meaning of life, human activity, and possible joys is devalued by the fact that life is passing and ends in Sheol (vv. 1-7). In essence, Qoheleth never finds an answer to the question of meaning. The conclusion is simple: everything is vanity (v. 8). But for a person of faith, that conclusion could not be final. Vanity is not merely empty and meaningless work and worry. The corresponding Hebrew word denotes something that does not belong to God's plan and purpose for the world and for humanity. Vanity is outside God's world; strictly speaking, it is outside being altogether. It is only a phantom, a shadow, a mist. If all human life and all human works are like that, then there is little difference between life on earth and existence in Sheol.

Such a conclusion completely devalued the human person and made a relationship with God something utterly impossible. But, as we can see, "everything is vanity!" is not Qoheleth's last word. His last word was the affirmation of the absolute value of God's commandments and complete confidence in the reality of the Judgment, which will put everything in its proper place (vv. 13-14). This conclusion seemed so unexpected that many biblical scholars considered it part of an epilogue added later, not by Qoheleth himself but by one of his followers.

But in substance, as also in language and style, this epilogue does not look foreign. It may indeed have been written by one of Qoheleth's disciples, who speaks of his teacher in the third person (vv. 9-10), but he most likely quotes his teacher's words, if not word for word, then extremely close to the original source. One could hardly expect anything else in the East, where the words of teachers and mentors were always treated with great respect and were often memorized. In that case, the final words of the book clearly belong to Qoheleth himself, even though they were handed down to us by one of his disciples.

But then what we have before us, as we can see, is Qoheleth after a spiritual crisis, having come to a faith that refutes all the doubts heard so clearly in the main part of the book. In essence, this must be a new conversion, one that evidently helped Qoheleth understand and experience in a new way concepts that had already seemed quite familiar to him, such as Torah, commandment, wisdom, and righteousness. And the reality of the Judgment became for him, as we can see, precisely a reality, a genuine and unquestionable reality that determines all of human life. This is possible only when God powerfully enters a person's life and completely changes it. Apparently this intervention became the completion of Qoheleth's spiritual path, and perhaps also of his life path, so that the testimony to the teacher's final turning to God had to be borne by one of his disciples.