NOTES for Ecc 6:1-12
In chapters 6–8, Ecclesiastes develops the thought of wise moderation outlined at the end of chapter 5. Chapter six is of exceptional importance in this context. Here Ecclesiastes says that wealth and glory are given to a person by God; yet he regards possessing them too as vanity and chasing the wind. Death sets a limit to the enjoyment of wealth, while a person's fate after death is beyond their control. On this basis, Ecclesiastes draws a profound distinction between a person's earthly needs and what their soul needs. Wealth brings only an abundance of food: ‘All a person's labour is for their mouth, yet their soul is not satisfied.’ Neither prosperity, nor the long life people strive for, nor even numerous descendants and glory can satisfy the soul. Yet without this mysterious food of the spirit, without that in which a person's soul can delight as the body delights in earthly pleasures, there is no point in living.
This is a very serious conclusion, which may be called the book of Ecclesiastes' central one: nothing earthly satisfies the soul, yet if the soul does not find its mysterious food, life loses its meaning. ‘Man lives not by bread alone, but by every [word] that comes from the mouth of the Lord’ was said in Deuteronomy. Ecclesiastes affirms the same thing; moreover, for him the soul's food takes precedence over everything else, even over human life itself.
At first sight, Ecclesiastes says nothing about what can ‘satisfy the soul’, becoming a source of joy and life for it. Yet perhaps we should attend here to what he does not say. As he systematically considers human life and its components, touching on both piety and relations with God, Ecclesiastes finds nothing that could ‘satisfy the soul’. Nevertheless, he pointedly leaves outside his inquiry the experience of a person's direct communion with God, the Redeemer of Israel. For a sage and investigator living in the post-exilic era, when God sent many prophets to his people—the last of them may have been the author's contemporaries—such silence can only be deliberate.
Only the Almighty himself, whose being is shrouded in mystery and incomprehensible to the children of men, remains outside Ecclesiastes' inquiry. This is, essentially, natural, since the Lord, at least for Ecclesiastes, dwells beyond the human world. But if nothing in the human world can ‘satisfy the soul’, while the soul nevertheless demands satisfaction, then the answer to Ecclesiastes' quest can lie only with God.
And the Lord gives this answer, saying, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you: it was not Moses who gave you bread from heaven, but my Father gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world’, and ‘I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me will never hunger, and whoever believes in me will never thirst’ (John 6:32–33, 35). For Ecclesiastes, however, this answer has not yet been spoken, and so his words are full of sorrow. Still, as we have already noted, it matters that Ecclesiastes assumes an answer to the question of the Bread of Life must exist. Though he does not find it himself, his sorrow gives birth to hope.