Shooting the “Hevel” with Qohelet
One of my favorite books of the bible is Qohelet (Ecclesiastes). When I was a teenager, I became fascinated with this book, for I thought: “here is a book that is asking hard questions about real life!” Of course, in a sense all books of the bible confront us with hard questions and make us think outside our little boxes, but the style of Qohelet was unlike anything I had read up to that point. But as fascinated as I was with this book, it was also extremely frustrating because it didn’t seem to fit the mold of what a biblical book should look like (or what I thought it should look like) and it raised more questions than it answered.
Many years have passed now and I am still trying to better understand Qohelet. About a year ago, I was able to read Qohelet in Hebrew for the first time and I realized that there was a lot more to it than I thought. I concluded that the best thing to do was to engage in a conversation with Qohelet and his interpreters. That’s why I decided to create a series for that purpose. “Shooting the ‘hevel’ with Qohelet” is an ongoing conversation about this book and what it means that everything is “hevel.”
Iain Provan, in his thought-provoking commentary on Qohelet, concludes his introduction with the following:
Ecclesiastes, as part of the Scripture that is given us for shaping faith and life, offers us such advice [about living and not just waiting], correlating as it does so with extensive sections of the New Testament that also touch on such themes. In focusing our attention on this life rather than the next, indeed, this book contributes to the correction of an all-too-frequent imbalance throughout the ages in Christian thinking, which has sometimes presented Christianity as if it were more a matter of waiting for something than a matter of living.
It is this balance that this series aims for.
