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.
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One of the crucial considerations when reading Qohelet is whether or not one thinks that the frame narrator is fundamentally criticizing Qohelet and rejecting his arguments. If this is true, then many would say that the bulk of Qohelet should be understood as “life under the sun” and that we, as Christians, should have a heavenly (i. e. above the sun) perspective of life. Ecclesiastes then, for the most part, becomes a how-not-to book. This way, we fail to do what Murphy says we should do, that is, allow for tensions that would have existed within the author himself, and attempt to explain the book as it stands (Murphy, Tree of Life, 52).

However, reading Ecclesiastes as one piece doesn’t seem to be only a matter of allowing for the tensions within the book but also allowing the book to interpret itself. Sometimes this will yield surprising and insightful results.

This can be seen in Peter Enns’ article about our understanding of the phrase (usually rendered as “the whole duty of man”, NIV, ESV and KJV) in 12:13. My intention is not to reproduce the article here but to give you a taste of the main contours of his argument and offer some personal reflections. Read more »

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. Read more »