The Words of the Preacher

I have recently managed to trim my inbox from an embarrassingly ludicrous number of emails down to those which still must be dealt with in one way or another. It took months. And yet, whenever I open my email I am frustrated by the multitudes of new messages which require no decision whatsoever before deleting them. Though I’ve unsubscribed to hundreds of entities, there are still more demanding my attention. What was supposed to be a convenience has become an overwhelming chore. In this day and age, keeping a clean inbox is an exercise in futility! I want to yell at my computer screen with the words of the Preacher: 

Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher,
    vanity of vanities! All is vanity. —Ecclesiastes 1:2

We’re beginning a study of the book of Ecclesiastes this Fall, and the honesty of the Preacher over the futility of “life under the sun” is relatable, refreshing, and—to be honest— somewhat uncomfortable. To know that the frustrations that we experience are nothing new, but are also recorded in sacred Scripture is a relief. But to wrestle with them in the nitty-gritty of life, especially to the extent to which the Preacher presses us, may at times be disconcerting.

Defining “Vanity”

Before we conclude that Scripture tells us that all of life is utterly meaningless, we should define our terms. The Hebrew word behind “vanity” can also be translated as “breath” or “breeze.” It is translated elsewhere as “’temporary,’ ‘transitory,’ ‘meaningless,’ ‘senseless,’ ‘futile,’ ‘ephemeral,’ ‘contingent,’ ‘incomprehensible,’ ‘incongruous,’ ‘absurd,’ ‘empty,’ ‘and more visually as ‘a striving after wind,’ ‘a bubble,’ ‘smoke that curls up into the air,’ ‘mist,’  or ‘breath’/’mere breath.’”[1] “The Preacher is saying that everything is a mist, a vapor, a puff of wind, a bit of smoke.”[2]

When the Preacher says that “all is vanity,” he means: life is short. It slips through our hands faster than we realize. Ecclesiastes calls us to face the fact that we won’t live forever. There is coming a day for each of us when we will die. Furthermore, this world is not meant to be our home. Rather than reducing our efforts and accomplishments into insignificance, realizing the brevity of our lives is meant to infuse every action with significance.

 Living Fully Facing Death

In the preface to his excellent book on Ecclesiastes, David Gibson writes,

Only a proper perspective on death provides the true perspective on life. Living in the light of your death will help you to live wisely and freely and generously. It will give you a big heart and open hands, and enable you to relish all of the small things of life in deeply profound ways. Death can teach you the meaning of mirth.

Ecclesiastes teaches us to live life backward. It encourages us to take the one thing in the future that is certain—our death—and work backward from that point into all the details and decisions and heartaches of our lives, and to think about them from the perspective of our end. It is the destination that makes sense of the journey. . . . Ecclesiastes invites us to let the end sculpt our priorities and goals, our greatest ambitions and all our strongest desires. . . . Only if you prepare to die can you really learn how to live.[3]

If we have this proper perspective on our life and death, the irritations and annoyances of daily life will diminish to their rightful insignificance. Then the blessings of the simple pleasures will rise to their rightful place outshining the petty nothings which steal our joy in the good gifts God gives. Gifts such as bread and wine, family, the days and portion He has allotted to us, the work he puts before us, and whatever our hands find to do (Ecc. 9:7–10).

Who is the Preacher?

One question we must always ask when studying a book of the Bible is, who is the author? With this book, the answer isn’t as straightforward as we’d like it to be. The very first line of Ecclesiastes answers the question in an obscure way. “The words of the Preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem” (1:1). King Solomon is the most obvious answer to the authorship of this, one of the wisdom books from the Old Testament, but why doesn’t he come out and say it plainly? Why is his name never mentioned in the entire book? The root of the Hebrew word qoheleth, translated “the Preacher” (in the ESV), “literally means ‘to gather, collect, or assemble.’ [4]  It’s used elsewhere in the Bible to refer to “the gathering or assembly of a community of people, especially for the worship of God. So Qoheleth is not so much a teacher in a classroom but more like a pastor in a church.”[5]

Some of the wise sayings in Ecclesiastes sound very much like something Solomon would say, lining up with what we learn of his life and reign in 1 Kings. But then other aspects of Ecclesiastes don’t seem to match Solomon’s life at all. Any of the kings from David’s line who ruled from David’s city would rightly be called a “son of David, king in Jerusalem,” but none of them can claim the great wisdom or wealth of Solomon reflected in the first few chapters of Ecclesiastes. Many biblical scholars believe that Ecclesiastes may be a fictional autobiography, written by someone else about Solomon—not to deceive, but to make the spiritual point of the futility of life without God, which Solomon’s life abundantly proved.

Phillip Ryken admits that “Ecclesiastes my well have been written by Solomon himself; this is the most natural way to read the Biblical text.” He then adds:

But even if another author used Solomon to help make his point, the words of Ecclesiastes are the very words of God, inspired by the Holy Spirit. The end of the book tells us that whatever wisdom we find in this book has been “given by one Shepherd” (Ecc. 12:11), meaning God himself. Furthermore, Solomon’s life is clearly presented as the Biblical context for what we read in Ecclesiastes. The book’s real-life background—and we need to see it from this perspective—is the story we read about Solomon in 1 Kings and other places.

. . . When Solomon dedicated the temple in 1 Kings 8, the Bible says that he “assembled” Israel (v. 1), and then it repeatedly says that the Israelites formed an “assembly” (e.g., v. 14). Thus the vocabulary in 1 Kings 8 is closely related to the terminology of Ecclesiastes 1, where we read the words of Qoheleth—the person who speaks to the assembly. Ecclesiastes is Solomon’s sermon to people gathered for the worship of God.[6]

I’m looking forward to the challenge of digging into this enigmatic and challenging book of the Bible. I pray the Lord leads us into all wisdom and truth as we search the Scriptures, that we learn to correctly weigh the pettiness of passing worldly irritations, and that through the mists and vapors of Ecclesiastes we see the secure reliability of our Savior Jesus more clearly.

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[1] Douglas Sean O’Donnell, Ecclesiastes:  Reformed Expository Commentary, (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2014) 8 quoting also William Ernest Henley, “Of The Nothingness of Things,” in Poems, (London: David Nutt, 1919), 94-97, and Robert Alter, The Wisdom Books: Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes: A Translation With Commentary (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2010), 346.

[2] David Gibson, Living Life Backward; How Ecclesiastes Teaches us to Live in Light of the End, (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2017) 19

[3] Gibson, p. 11–12

[4] Phillip Ryken, Ecclesiastes: Why Everything Matters, (Wheaton, IL: Crossway,2010), 16

[5] Ryken, 16

[6] Ryken, 18