A Time to Cast Away
We often hear of the power of stories, but sometimes it is good to see a specific example of how stories can help us make sense of what could be difficult to grasp in the abstract. They can also stimulate our imagination through their style, play on words, humor, cleverness, ambiguity, etc.
For this reason, I have often wondered what it would be like to transform Qohelet into a narrative. If you think that such a task is impossible or even ludicrous, the Rabbis didn’t think so. Let me show you an example. In chapter 3 Qohelet starts his “catalogue of times” and in verse 6 he says:
[a time to seek, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away (ESV)]
Now, how would you turn that into a story or an anecdote?
First of all, one may ask what it means that there is a time to lose and cast away. Michael Fox says that Qohelet “begins with this postulate that there is a time for everything and applies this rule not only to clearly useful actions, but even to the ones that may seem useless and even deleterious (Fox, A Time to Tear Down, p. 208). He gives two possible examples of this: Qoh. Rabbah v. 6b and the disappearance of the asses of Saul’s father in 1 Samuel 9:3. Many may be familiar with Saul’s story, but most, including me, would not have a clue what Midrash Qohelet Rabbah has to say about it.
Marc Hirshman in his article entitled The Greek Fathers and the Aggada on Ecclesiastes : Formats of Exegesis in Late Antiquity [Hebrew Union College Annual, no. 59 (1988): 137-165.] compares Christian commentaries believed to be written close to the time that comments on Ecclesiastes were being collated and edited in Palestine of the sixth and possibly seventh centuries A. D. I was particularly drawn by his description of Qohelet Rabbah and his examination of five facets of its aggadic exegesis:
- Solomonic exegesis which seeks to relate verses of Ecclesiastes to biblical verses which emphasize Solomon’s biography (for example, “I also gathered for myself silver and gold” in Eccl. 2:8 is related to “And the king made silver to be in Jerusalem as stones” in I Kings 10:27).
- Identification, allegory, and typology in which “verses of general import are related to a specific individual, event, or object drawn either from the Bible or from the Midrash’s contemporary surroundings” (p. 158).
- Anecdotes or chria which illustrate moral or theological points
- Mashal, generally translated ‘parable’, which can be defined as an allusive narrative told for an ulterior purpose.
- Cataloguing. For example, Eccl. 1:8 says “All things are wearisome” and a catalogue of four separate interpretations is given of “all things.”
Here I am only interested in the Rabbis’ use of anecdotes. Hirshman demonstrates how Qoh. Rab. deals with verse 3:6, specially as it is related to a “time to cast away.” Here is the anecdote:
A trader once made a voyage with his son taking with him chests filled with denarii. (The Captain) gave them quarters in a dark part of the ship. The man heard the voices of the sailors saying, ‘when we are out on the high sea, we will kill them, throw them overboard and take that store of denarii from him’. What did he do? He pretended to be angry with his son, took hold of the chests and threw them into the sea. When they landed he went and charged them before the emperor’s proconsul, who imprisoned them and condemned them to give the man his store of denarii. They said to the proconsul, ‘How do you judge us to be guilty?’ He answered them ‘From what Solomon King of Israel said, A time to cast away.’ (Midrash Rabbah Qohelet, trans. Rev. Dr. A. Cohen, London, 1939, p. 80)
To show the unique approach to this anecdote, it is helpful to see how Didymus of Alexandria, a Christian, interprets this passage in one of this sermonettes:
‘But others wish to die rather than relinquish their riches. Often we heard that some people remain on a shipwreck preferring to perish with their wealth’.
Didymus’ point here is clear: one should not value possessions over life itself!
One may wonder if the Rabbis could not have made the same point as succinctly. It is here that Hirshman shows what is so genius about the anecdote above:
“For the rabbis the ‘point’ of the story is never fully articulated. It is a clever illustration of the verse from Ecclesiastes that implicitly imparts the same message as Didymus. But it would never do to summarize the point. The rabbis were clearly bent on amusing their reader-listener with a good tale and its fine exegetical flourish. The underlying message is left unarticulated” (p. 161).
This anecdote made me stop and think of how I deal with passages like 3:6. I say this because my tendency is to look at the larger context of Qohelet’s arguments and concentrate on the main point of the passage. In other words, I would probably go through the “catalogue of times” rather quickly to get to the point that at the end Qohelet observes that we have no control over our time. Ecc. 3:11 says,
He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end. (ESV)
I also like the JPS’s translation of this verse:
He brings everything to pass precisely at its time; He also puts eternity in their mind, but without man ever guessing, from first to last, all the things that God brings to pass.
For the Rabbis though, everything was there for application in some sense. “A time to cast way” is not just a bridge to the main point, it is part of the point being made. This can be seen for example in the way they used Solomonic biograpahy to elucidate the text. Hirshman concludes,
It would seem that a main goal of this type of exegesis is to unify the Scriptural message, intertwining the diverse strands of the Bible into a consistent whole. This tack is taken by the Christian exegetes more in their citations of the New Testament. Both religions viewed their Holy Scriptures as a unified entity (p. 156).
In the same way that the Hebrew Bible is viewed as a “unified entity,” there is also a strong sense in which life for the Rabbis can only be viewed and interpreted through the prism of Scriptures. And one of the vehicles for doing this is through the telling of stories. And it is because of the lack of articulation of the way the story is told that we are able to use it to bring Qohelet’s full argument to bear. On the one hand, the story showed that a “time to cast away” was meant to preserve life over holding on to possessions, but, on the other hand, it shows that the circumstances of life are completely out of one’s ultimate control. It is exactly because we are not in control that we may have to cast away. The story ends with “things being put to rights” (as N. T. Wright would say) which we know doesn’t always happens, but if and when it happens it is because of God’s doing and not our own. I do not mean, of course, that the writer of this midrash was necessarily interested in making a theological point about our lack of control of things. But stories like this do have the power to make the reader reflect on the whole spectrum of how life relates to the ‘moral of the story.’
Many people seem to think that Qohelet is diffucult to understand or irrelevant (although they wouldn’t quite put it like this). I wonder if part of the problem is that we haven’t been creative enough to retell the story that Qohelet is trying to tell us. Although I found this Midrash’s anecdote imaginative and helpful, it was written centuries ago and I wonder what kinds of anecdotes and stories we can tell in the 21st century about the things Qohelet is talking about. Stories that stimulate the imagination, force us to pause and think, help us enter a different world and are true to the what Qohelet wanted us to hear.
