NOTES for Ecc 5:1
How could it happen that a believing Yahwist became, spiritually speaking, almost a Buddhist? After all, Yahwism is much more definite spiritually than Buddhism: it has a personal God, conscious relationships with Him, and a view of the world as God's creation. But all this "works" on one indispensable condition: personal and conscious relationships with God. If they are absent, then everything else is absent too.
Or rather, it is present, but for a person who has no personal relationship with God, it changes nothing. If "God is in heaven and we are on earth," then the earth is hopeless. God is high above and the king is far away. Indeed, Ecclesiastes says something like this: over some officials stand others, hence the problems, and it is good if there is a king who thinks about his country and his people. It seems, however, that Ecclesiastes does not have much hope for the appearance of such a king: such a thing happens too rarely... But for Ecclesiastes God too is like a great superior, like a king, only higher.
With Him too one must be careful; one must look and think about how to approach Him, what to say to Him, what to promise, and what not to promise... Strange, it would seem, since this same Ecclesiastes knows from experience that spiritual reality is not like social reality. Just now this same Ecclesiastes, at the boundary of God's eternity, was listening to apophatic silence, sensing behind it a Presence that could bring meaning into his life. But... one's sense of the world does not change overnight. Ecclesiastes apparently brought his religiosity out of his former life. Out of the life when he was an important man and did not think too much about meaning.
Being religious then was accepted; it was normal and natural. If, of course, the religiosity itself was "normal." Simple, clear, without wanderings and searches. That, apparently, is what Ecclesiastes' religiosity was like until the question of meaning arose in all its sharpness. And certainly meaning could least of all be found in this "normal" religiosity. It was not developed in order to give meaning to an individual human life.
If it could give meaning to anything, it was only to the existence of society and the state in their existing condition. To make people honor God as a king, and the king as God. Or as a god; here the difference is no longer very great. If God becomes like an earthly king, the earthly king sooner or later will become like an earthly god; such a transformation is practically inevitable. Only all this was very far from the reality that had opened to Ecclesiastes at the boundary of the world and Eternity. As far as earth from heaven.