Thread by @JamesBejon

THREAD: Eccl. 1–3 as a Philosophy for Life and a Reason for Joy.

The book of Ecclesiastes opens with a well-known phrase,

viz., הבל הבלים הכל הבל = ‘Vanity of vanities! All is vanity!’.

Solomon’s turn of phrase is commonly employed in Ecclesiastes,

and has even made its way into common English.

I once heard a member of Parliament quote it on Sky News, though the fact he quoted it in Latin (‘Vanitas vanitatum...’) rather detracted from its ‘commonness’.

For all its familiarity, however, the word הבל isn’t straightforward to translate.

It can refer among other things to ‘futility’ (Job 21.34, Psa. 62.9),

‘nothingness’ (Psa. 39.6, Isa. 49.4),

and a ‘breath/mist’ (Job 7.16, Psa. 39.5, Prov. 21.6).

And all of these notions inform Solomon’s employment of הבל.

Mist has a beauty to it.

But mist is also elusive.

You can’t put it in a bottle and take it home with you.

You have to enjoy it when and where you find it (before it fades away).

Solomon’s view of life is similar.

For Solomon, life isn’t an unmitigatedly futile endeavour.

Solomon can find ‘pleasure’ in many of his labours (2.10).

What he *cannot* find, however, is anything of permanence—anything he can take hold of and not have it dissolve in his hands.

As such, life is like a mist—a wind which cannot be grasped (1.14).

Life is also painfully ephemeral (9.9ff.)—a mist/dew which vanishes along with the dawn (cp. Psa. 39.5 w. Hos. 6.4, 13.3).

All of these notions lie behind Solomon’s employment of the word הבל, and are a constant source of grief to him.

Indeed, Solomon’s enquiry in ch. 1 leaves him utterly despondent.

‘What gain/profit (יתרון) is there in life?’, Solomon asks (1.3).

The word יתרון derives from the root יתר = ‘to remain, be left over’. It involves the notion of permanence and ‘net gain’.

Solomon wants to know what is ultimately achieved by life’s activities—what *difference* they make when all is said and done?

And the answer (from Solomon’s point of view in ch. 1) is ‘None’.

Life is like a balance sheet.

The left hand side cancels out the right hand side.

Every action has an equal and opposite reaction,

so the sum total of life’s activities is always zero.

The sun might rise, but it later sets.

Rain may fall, but it soon makes its way back into the clouds again.

Nothing makes any ultimate difference.

And so, 1.1–14 closes with the sad refrain הבל הבלים.

——————

These facts have an obvious application to the world’s materialists.

But they also have an application to Christians.

As Christians, it is easy for us to live in the future.

At any given moment, we will have a number of tasks in progress (or left unfinished) and a number of difficulties we want to resolve, often for good and godly reasons.

Once we’ve dealt with those things, we’ll sit back and rest content in how God has helped and blessed us. Or at least so we tell ourselves.

But by then new tasks and difficulties will have arisen.

The wind will have returned northwards and started to blow southwards again.

And, as a result, we will have missed out on the good things of the day—the things God gives us to enjoy on a daily basis.

Since our satisfaction is located in the resolution of a supply of future tasks (which grows as fast as it shrinks), we fail to be satisfied in the present,

all of which is, remarkably, what Solomon comes to realise in ch. 3.

‘God has made everything beautiful/appropriate’, Solomon tells us, ‘in its appointed time’ (3.11).

In other words, God has given us pleasures to be experienced and enjoyed as and when he gives them to us.

Life’s activities are not to be evaluated solely in terms of their future value or net benefit;

they are to be enjoyed as gifts/opportunities which come from the hand of God (2.24).

That is why ch. 3’s activities are not simply another balance sheet—another zero-sum game.

That there is a time to weep is not cancelled out by the fact there is a time to laugh.

That there is a time to plant is not cancelled out by the fact there is a time to uproot.

Rather, all these things are beautiful/appropriate—and are to be enjoyed as such—in their God-ordained time.

Most of us presently have a measure of health and freedom which we will not have in days to come,

and, consequently, Solomon calls us to enjoy what we can while we can (cp. 11.8ff.).

That may, of course, sound like ‘worldly wisdom’ to some, but it is far from worldly for two important reasons.

First, Solomon does not invite us to enjoy the pleasures of sin or of a naturalistic creation;

rather, Solomon calls us to enjoy what *God* has made and to occupy ourselves with tasks which *God* has assigned to us (3.10–11).

Second, contentment and gratitude are by no means the hallmarks of ‘the world’;

they are hallmarks of those who have grasped something of the goodness of their Creator and of his abundant grace towards us, his creatures.

THE END.