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Ecclesiastes' Son
Andrew Kuiper on Jewish Liturgy & Deeper Christian Exegesis
The book of Ecclesiastes has always been something of a ghost at the banquet of Sacred Scripture. The central theme of hebel or "vanity," understood in the sense of futility, seems to encroach not just on the goodness of creation and the significance of the imago Dei but even on Wisdom herself. All plans for the future are subject to determined times. But those times (unlike Pete Seeger's folksy rendition of Qoheleth's refrain in "Turn! Turn! Turn!") are impossible for man to know and subsequently stymie all his actions. They are in the hands of an obscure God. The divine name of YHWH is not known in the book, only the more general Elohim.
True, Qoheleth says that it is better to be wise than to be a fool, but that seems to border on an aesthetic judgment. The fruits of wisdom and those of folly hardly differ, and all flesh returns to dust without the hope of a final judgment. This evaluation is a far cry from the rest of the Wisdom literature and especially from the quasi-divine status of Lady Wisdom in Proverbs 8, who plays and sings joyfully with the children of men.
This contradiction was first noticed not by contemporary biblical scholars (or even early modern precursors like Spinoza and Herder) but by the self-reflection of the people of God. Like the Song of Songs, another book of supposed Solomonic provenance, Ecclesiastes was almost culled from the Jewish canon at Jamnia. The disciples of Shammai opposed its inclusion on what we must concede are intuitive grounds. An unfortunate Epicureanism seems to shade the entire work, the tone of which is only weakly emended by the epilogue in chapter 12. The scribal injunction to fear God and keep his commandments hovers over the rest of the text without any solid anchor-point to justify it.
The Shammaites were, however, unsuccessful and soon dissipated along with their objections after Jamnia. The question then became for the Hebrew people (and those Christian communities that inherited this canonical collection) how to glean religious significance from this bare fact of inclusion.
Ecclesiastes & Sukkoth
The attraction of this book was so powerful that not only was it kept, but it was also accorded a public function in one of the most prominent liturgical feasts. In a development that was more significant than any particular interpretation could be, Ecclesiastes became an official reading for Sukkoth (the feast of Tabernacles), which celebrated both the autumn harvest of grapes and wheat and the providential oversight of God as the Hebrew people pitched their tents in the wilderness. The juxtaposition of that harvest, rich with wine, with Qoheleth's preaching concerning the futility of all toil seems like an unusual choice.
Nor was it ignored by the subtle minds of the great Jewish commentators. Rashi, arguably the greatest rabbinic exegete of the Middle Ages, perceived a hermeneutic principle for this difficult book in the refrain everything under the sun. By identifying the "sun" with the light of the Torah (as expressed in Proverbs 6:23), futility applies to all those activities that are not contemplation of the holy fire of the divine commandments. Rashi also notes that the elaboration of seven "vanities" in the prologue should suggest to us the seven-fold structure of the creation of the world. He uses this to qualify Qoheleth's statement that there is nothing new, which he says applies only to those activities corresponding to the first six days. The seventh day corresponds to the contemplation of the Torah, and this is, according to its divine nature, a site of inexhaustible exegetical fertility.
The difficulty apparent in this kind of spiritual reading is that it strains our modern credulity. It is embarrassing for us as an inappropriate display of emotion. We often lack the spiritual vision and affective fortitude to perceive and embrace these sorts of readings as real. As a consequence, the inheritance of patristic and rabbinic exegesis becomes at best a private devotional tool and at worst an absurd historical oddity. This attitude dismisses the handiwork of the most spiritually earnest and intellectually gifted of our forebears as fundamentally unserious.
Alternatively, we see spiritual readings undercut in a more subtle way, by hermetically sealing them off from historical-critical considerations. If giants like Origen and Rashi were concerned with the tiniest of grammatical details and syntactic valences, why would we keep their exegesis in a separate compartment from the wealth of research and material we have on many textual and historical issues?
The most persistent harm in modern man's stance toward the Bible is that these spiritual readings are regarded as a mere trick of the light, so insubstantial that the smallest movement will cause them to dissipate like an iridescent mist over a waterfall. But the spiritual masters did not intend their readings as a shimmering surface gloss destined to fade in the cold light of day. Their understanding of the Scriptures was born of an insight into the fundamentally opalescent character of revelation. We can only do justice to the venerable exegetes of our religious traditions by opening up all modern avenues of enquiry to their vision. While the believing and practicing community itself requires dogmatic and liturgical unity, this does not have to be naively retrojected into the canon of Scripture itself. The task of a truly spiritual interpretation is to take up the text and its material history—with all of its vagaries and contradictions—into a theological whole.
Andrew Kuiper received a B.A. in Philosophy and Religion from Hillsdale in 2012 and then taught elementary school in the Great Hearts Charter School system in Phoenix, Arizona. His articles have appeared in The Regensburg Forum and The Imaginative Conservative, and he contributes to the blog at Ex Fontibus (exfontibus.com). He now lives in South Bend, Indiana, with his wife and two boys.
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