NOTES for Ecc 3:1-22
The famous verses at the beginning of chapter three might more readily belong to a Greek than to someone formed by biblical culture. With inexpressible sorrow, Ecclesiastes says that everything in the world is subject to the laws of cyclical change and that everything returns to its starting point. Human deeds and actions, he says, are explained not so much by free will as by a convergence of circumstances obedient to the laws of the world. A person is like a puppet: the time to weep comes, and they weep; the time to laugh comes, and they laugh… Yet, as far as we can judge from what Ecclesiastes says next, he does not wholly share this bleak worldview himself; rather, it is an object of his inquiry. Immediately after these beautiful and sorrowful sayings, he speaks of a concept directly opposed to time and the laws governing it: the mystery of eternity. Thus, unlike Greek thinkers, Ecclesiastes sees something else behind the world's cycles. He sees how alien the human being appears in an endlessly recurring world of predetermined events.
The futility of earthly prosperity leads Ecclesiastes to think of the One who grants it to human beings. Everything that happens is in his hand, and he has appointed a time for everything; nothing will pass beyond the bounds of the divine purpose. Ecclesiastes affirms the goodness of God's works and speaks of eternity, ha-olam, which God has placed in the human heart. The Russian Synodal translation follows the Vulgate here, which offers the reading ‘et mundum tradidit disputationi eorum’; the Septuagint renders olam as aeon, eternity. The Slavonic translation follows this version—‘He has put every age in their heart’—as do modern translations. To ‘place eternity within a human being’ means to endow them with God-like qualities, to stamp human nature with eternity, with divinity.
It is precisely this belonging to eternity that contradicts the experience Ecclesiastes described in the preceding chapter; it is what makes the meaninglessness and futility of earthly life so unbearable. Yet the answer to this remains a mystery to Ecclesiastes, as he indicates in 3:12–15.
A person's visible fate, however, links them with animals. In 3:16–22, Ecclesiastes offers the reader an argument unique in the entire Bible: without God, without the eternity he has placed in the human heart, human beings in themselves are animals. Like animals, a person dies and returns to dust, and ‘has no advantage over the beasts, for all is vanity!’ Ecclesiastes sees the difference between animals and human beings in the human spirit's belonging to the world above, but he emphasises that this is only an opinion. One cannot fail to notice the essentially evolutionary nature of this argument. For the author himself, however, what matters here is that only the gift of eternity makes a human being human.