NOTES for Ecc 8:16-17
So what is wisdom? Is there any meaning in it at all? It turns out that there is: it allows a person to orient himself in what is happening. This is not the highest meaning, which remains God's mystery, but an earthly meaning accessible to man. Everything on earth has its time; everything in its time will be given an adequate evaluation, and God's judgment is entirely real; the only question is when the day of His judgment will come. These very times and seasons are what earthly wisdom allows one to know. Life on earth flows in its course; all the forms of the world and all its events are born from this flow and in their turn return back, while God watches over everything from above.
Why this flow? What is it for? Why is life this way and not another? Why is there so much evil in it? Why was there less evil before, and was there really less of it? Only God knows the answers to all these questions, and human wisdom is powerless here. But when and what one can expect from the flow of life, what and when can appear from it, and what is soon destined to disappear again into it, about this earthly, human wisdom can speak. This, in fact, is what it is needed for. At first glance this is a somewhat strange approach to wisdom, but here it is precisely the wisdom of this world.
For the Jews, wisdom was never something abstractly theoretical or contemplative; it was always associated with ability, skill, practice. And in Ecclesiastes it proves quite practical. True, practical wisdom was usually always connected with the possibility of somehow building a person's life, outward or inward. Here there is no talk of building life: Ecclesiastes is quite sure that this is impossible and meaningless.
A person cannot direct the flow of life in the desired direction; here wisdom is powerless. But it allows one to orient oneself in this flow, remaining practice more than theory, though not the practice of building or changing life, but, so to speak, of life navigation, the art of swimming in the flow of life. Well, being able to swim in the sea of life is certainly necessary. But is this the wisdom Ecclesiastes was seeking?