Course: Old Testament Survey

Lecture: Ecclesiastes

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I. Existentialism

Ecclesiastes is next in our rapid run through. I am going to start with something that may seem a little funny and that is a brief summary of Existentialism. It is because Ecclesiastes reflects the kind of outlook that you have in the philosophical stance called Existentialism. Existentialism says, in effect, that this life is all there is; there is no after life and there is no God. Does all Existentialism say that? No, there is also theistic existentialism of the kind represented by Kierkegaard.

A. Theistic Existentialism

But Kierkegaard himself, the melancholy Dane, says that we must live life as if there were no God because we do not get from Him a lot of direct guidance. He felt lonely and estranged from God and believed that was our real situation. Yes, God exists and He created everything, but He does not have a lot of methods by which we can reach Him and touch Him and know Him personally. You must live with a lot of doubt, a lot of uncertainty and so “You work out your salvation with fear and trembling.” He loved that verse from Paul and made it into what Paul did not mean by it. Paul said, “You be careful to stay with Christ. You be afraid that you do anything to jeopardize your salvation.” Kierkegaard took that to mean, “You have to figure out your salvation and you do it with fear and trembling because you never know.” There is a lot of uncertainty.

B. Dostoevsky and Nietzsche

Dostoevsky said it this way, “If God didn’t exist, everything would be permitted.” If there is no God, and there is no heaven and no life after death and so on, you could do anything you want; you just live. Nietzsche said, “God is dead.” He did not mean by that that there was a God who was alive. He meant we do not do philosophy anymore with God in mind. We are working out how to live, how to think, how to act without the presumption that God is the one who sets the value system.

C. "Because of death, life is absurd."

Existentialism in general says, “Because of death, life is absurd.” What does that mean? Think of it this way, you can say, “I’m going to live a great and wonderful life. I’m going to do everything, I’m going to be kind to people, I’m going to be good, I am never going to put bubblegum under anybody’s seat. I’m going to be the nicest person I can think of,” and go through life doing that. If you are really dead, you do not have any memory. You cannot say, “Now that I’m dead I’m satisfied that I lived a good life,” because if you are really dead, we are talking about death now where there is no afterlife, no conscious survival, you are just dead like an ant that gets stepped on, you do not think back because you cannot think at all. You do not have any memory, you do not exist. So if you lived a good life, the minute you are dead, to you it does not mean anything because nothing means anything to you. You are dead, you do not exist. You have no meaning, no sense, no feeling, no recollection, no nothing.

Suppose you live an evil life. You tripped little old ladies waiting to cross the street, you put bubblegum down people’s necks, you do everything, all kinds of evil. You plow into crowds with pickup trucks. When you are dead, it does not matter. You do not say, “Oh, what a lousy life I lived.” You do not think anything because you do not think, you do not remember, you are nothing. In the Existentialist system people say, “Wait a minute, once you are dead, life does not count at all, it is absurd, it is not meaningful.” Since all of us are going to die and will be, soon enough, in that state of nothingness; it does not matter how we live, life is simply absurd. You cannot say there is such a thing as a good life or a bad life. You can only say there is an authentic life. The one thing a true full-blown, committed Existentialist, will say, “You can live authentically,” that is, you can have some satisfaction now, at this moment, at this point of existence in doing what is authentic to you.” That gets variously defined. But they will not usually say what is right or what is wrong. They will say what is authentic. It is a purposeful use of a term to avoid making real value judgments. Ecclesiastes tends to say that.

II. Summary

Here is again a very rapid, zippy, kind of quick summary. Again and again Ecclesiastes says that things are meaningless.

A. Chapter 1

Things are meaningless, death makes life absurd, and wisdom yields only disappointment. What a thing to say in a wisdom book at the end of chapter one.

B. Chapter 2

Pleasures, projects, meaningless, wisdom, and folly. Death makes life and work meaningless.

C. Chapter 3.

It is fatalistic, it uses authentic living language. What happens happens. And, animals and humans are alike.

D. Chapter 4.

There is meaninglessness in oppression, envy, materialism success, career, anything like that.

E. Chapter 5

Authentic living, do it. It emphasizes trying to enjoy the time while you are young, that kind of language. Eat, drink and be merry sort of language. That is all ways of saying be authentic. There is no absolute, ultimate right or wrong. Political power or wealth are meaningless.

F. Chapter 6

Even divine blessing, wealth and long life are meaningless; they are futile. Both proverbial and speculative wisdom are futile. In other words, the Book of Proverbs and the Book of Job are useless.

G. Not Meaningless At All

Then all of a sudden you come to this at the end of the book, and I would argue that you come to this at the end of Ecclesiastes because the writer just does not want you to miss what is going on here, just to be sure nobody misunderstands what the writer has done. This is the very last chapter, 12, 13, and 14. “Now all has been heard, here is the conclusion. I’ve said everything I want to say, let me be sure you get this conclusion.” “Fear God and keep His commandments for this is the whole purpose of man,” or whole duty of man, “for God will bring every deed into judgment including every hidden thing whether it is good or evil.” The choices do count. The idea then is that there is a judgment and everything will be judged. It is not meaningless at all.

III. Foils

So what has the writer done? The writer has given us what in literature we call a foil.

A. Tempting, misleading alternatives

A foil is a tempting, misleading alternative. In a murder mystery, you know a type of literature, a play, or a novel, there is a lot of foils built in. You are not supposed to know who did it in chapter two and just read along until they catch the person. You are supposed to wonder, “I wonder who did it.” You are supposed to suspect the nurse for a while and then maybe the butler and then maybe the maid for a while, then maybe the gardener, then maybe Mrs. Alfonzo from next door. You suspect all of these people and finally some brilliant person, usually the detective who gathers them in the living room, explains who really did it. You say, “Yeah I get it, I see who did it.” But those other people who did not do the murder were tempting, they have to be tempting, you have to consider them as a real possibility, and they have to be realistic in some way, but they are, in fact, the alternative to what the truth is. That is what Job’s comforters do. Everything Eliphaz says, Bildad says, Zophar and Elihu are all foil material. It is all foil. It sounds good, it is well-motivated. People might think this is great stuff. You can take it out of context and say, “Does that sound good to you?” and most people will say, “It sounds great to me.” So do many parts of Ecclesiastes. “How does that sound?” “It sounds deep, I like it, ‘A time to live and a time to die’, wow.” But really it is just fatalism; it is all just meaningless fatalism.

B. "If this life is all there is ..."

The purpose is to show you what life is like, what conclusions you come to if there is no God, who cares or is involved, and especially if this life is all there is. If this life is all there is, what Bildad, Zophar, Eliphaz and Elihu say really has a lot of merit. If this life is all there is, the meaninglessness of the Existentialists has a lot of merit. What Ecclesiastes says up until the last two verses has a lot of merit. The great use of Ecclesiastes is to say to people, “Do you think this life is all there is? If so, read this. This is what you’ve got to look forward to; this is what level of meaning there is in your life.”

C. Emptiness of life

It really is a description of the emptiness that life is without a judgment and a life after death.

D. Argument for judgment and life after death

Ecclesiastes is a wonderful argument for the fact that there must be and will be a judgment and a life after death. That is its function. That is the nature of Ecclesiastes in Scripture and it is a wonderful book for that function. When you preach it and teach it, that is exactly the way to make it. Just keep examining all these ways that there is a kind of hopelessness, a kind of sad emptiness to life unless there will be a judgment and an afterlife, which then is the sort of thing that makes all of life have meaning. So when Jesus says, “Look, watch out. Every idol word you’ve spoken will be called into question at the judgment,” he is saying this life has meaning right down to the words you say. Everything in life is significant. It will be judged and evaluated on that final day. That is really the kind of thing that Ecclesiastes says as well.

Song of Songs

I. Romance is Essential (Starts at 11:43)

Last little bit is Song of Songs. I wish I had a nickel for every time I have had somebody in the office at church say to me the romance has disappeared from our marriage. When you are a pastor you do a lot of marriage counseling, and a lot of people will tell you that there is no more romance; there just is not any romance left in their life. A lot of people have romance in the artificial state of courtship until the time they get married. Then, all of a sudden, there the husband is, just sitting on the couch in his T-shirt and shorts with a bottle of beer watching wrestling. Romance is just gone.

II. Applying the Song of Songs

Here is what is going on in the Song of Songs. I think that this little summation is perhaps the simplest way that I can get across the kinds of points that are being made. There is a kind of a storyline to the Song of Songs. Basically, it is that Solomon is getting married. There is this person called the . In Hebrew, Shulamite means, in effect, Mrs. Solomon. She and he are getting married and there are all kinds of temptations to them. There are temptations for him to just not show up and pay attention to her. There are temptations where she is out and people are trying to dissuade her from finding him or she is worried about being able to find him. There are some dream sequences where, you know how you can dream that a car or a truck or a train is bearing down on you and you cannot move very fast and you cannot get out of the way? There are some of those types of things. He is knocking at the door of her house and she wants so to be in his arms and she just cannot make it to the door in time and when she gets there and opens it, he is gone. I think that in the middle of the book, roughly, they get married. Then I think the end of the book really describes their honeymoon. I have not proved it just be asserting it, but the commentary on the Song of Songs in a series called The New American Commentary written by our own Professor Garrett, does a good job of outlining the story progression. You will see in that book some details that are just a little bit different from the way I have said it here, but basically we are agreed that there is a story of courtship, marriage, and then honeymoon. Throughout everything romance is emphasizes. What do we have going on in our day? There are a lot of “sex therapists” and there are a lot of people thinking that happiness comes in a lot of sex. You know that. Most of you know that in the colleges you went to and the cultures that we are in, a lot of people are thinking, “That’s just great, that’s really smart.”

A. True love is exclusive and faithful.

What is incredible is this—almost every study that has ever been done that has looked at happiness in marriage has came up with the same conclusion and astoundingly so; the narrow, conservative, religious people, Catholic or Protestant or whatever, who are dead against adultery and dead against premarital sex and any extramarital sex, have the happiest sex life. They report incredibly that they are absolutely happy, “I’ve never had sex with anybody but this person here, and I’m just as happy about it as I can be.” That is the way they report it. The people who are having all the sex that they possibly can have usually report they are not really very happy; they are constantly looking for happiness and they are not finding it. What the Song says is that there is happiness in being exclusive and being faithful.

B. True love is staying attracted to one person

True love means that you stay attracted to one person. Sure, for short periods of time, of course it would be easy to let yourself be tempted to be more attracted to one person or another.

C. True love is acting like the two of you are one flesh

There is a lot of that in the Song, a lot of the way they work together.

D. True love leads to sex only in marriage

E. True love preserves romance in marriage

F. True love is pure and permanent

What is going on here is the story of just being together; how sharing activities, sharing values, and so on is what counts. There is nothing about sexual technique, there is nothing about sexual frequency; those things are not important. It is the romance that counts. In support of this, there are a lot of things in the Song that might seem kind of weird. You have descriptions about each other and they say things about each other that, to us, sound kind of funny. How can it be that people would use these sorts of comparisons? “Your teeth are like a flock of sheep just shorn coming up from the washing, each one has a twin, not one of them is alone.” Gee, a double set of teeth, is that what this is? Is it braces, what is it? “Your lips are like a scarlet ribbon. Your mouth is level. Your temples behind your veil are like halves of a pomegranate. Your neck is like the tower of David,” that is a long neck, “built with elegance, on it hang a thousand shields; all of them shields of warriors.” What is this? Is it zits or something? I do not get it. So, we might say weird descriptions. In every case what is going on this—when I look at you I see what is special, what is dignified, what is grand, what is beautiful and compares to anything you would love to look at that is just delightful to see.

III. Comparison to Modern Love Songs

Here are some comparisons. I took some show tunes, you could find this in any kind of literature, but I happened to have access to the lyrics of some show tunes. Here is one, “You’re the top, you’re the Coliseum. / You’re the top, you’re the Louvre Museum,” and so on. “I’m a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop. / But if, baby, I’m the bottom, you’re the top! / You’re the cream in my coffee, you’re the salt in my stew. / You’re the starch in my collar, You’re the lace in my shoe,” people actually wrote these lyrics, “ You’re the sail of my love boat, you’re the captain and crew, / You will always be my necessity, I’d be lost without you.” Here is Tommy Dorsey, “You are perfection, you’re my idea. / Of angels singing the Ave Maria.” From R. Rodgers, “With a song in my heart, I behold your adorable face, / Just a song at the start, but it soon is a hymn to your grace. / When the music swells, I’m touching your hand.” That is the kind of thing you have in the Song. “It tells that you’re standing near, and / At the sound of your voice, heaven opens its portholes to me…”

This is the kind of thing going on. It really has many parallels in modern music and love songs and so on. It is a great thing for encouraging this sort of thing. When can you use the Song? You can use it in marriage counseling, you can use it in pre-marriage counseling. Have people read the Song and say to them, “Here is my assignment for next week, read the Song of Songs together, read it out loud, one to the other and get the point that you owe each other romance throughout life.” You may have to do some of the things that pastors have to do; teach men who are getting married that it is useful to bring their wives flowers. To men that does not seem useful. A chainsaw maybe, that might be useful. You cannot imagine, why would she want flowers? It is a total waste. You cut them and then they are dead. Teach them how to do romantic things; teach them how to be tender, how to be attentive, how to be kind, how to say when you come home dead tired, “It’s great to see you, how are things with you?” It is those things that have such power in a marriage and enormous significance. Women have a responsibility as well not to say, “Got any money?” as the first thing that they say when you arrive home. What we have got in the Song is a model of what it should be and written probably for one of his marriages. But the real value of it was lost on him, the value is for us who can, in fact, follow what is always the Biblical ideal, one husband, one wife and stay together. Here is a thing that puts Solomon in the picture and I think all the more powerfully, in effect it is saying, if only Solomon would do this, if only. He is the guy who should and he does not.