Dr. Richard Belcher, Professor of Old Testament and Academic Dean at RTS Atlanta, Dallas, and Houston, offers insight into Ecclesiastes. He highlights how Kohelet’s reflections reveal the limits of human wisdom and the reality of life in a fallen world. While the book encourages enjoying the “portion” of our labor, true meaning and hope are found only in Christ, who rescues us from futility.
The following is a transcript of the video above.
How should I understand the book of Ecclesiastes?
Ecclesiastes is a fascinating book, and there are many views on it. I take a pretty negative view of the first-person discourse, which is chapters 1:12 through 12:8, written by someone called Kohelet, who is translated as the preacher. And I think a wise man came along, took that, and presented it to his son. “My son” appears in the epilogue of the book to warn him of the dangers of speculative wisdom. Now, not everybody agrees with my approach to the book, and that’s okay; there’s room for disagreement. But I want to lay out just a few of the exegetical reasons why I take the negative view I do.
First, I would say that Kohelet’s approach to his search for the meaning of life is based on an empirical methodology through observation. The verb “I saw” occurs 18 times in the book of Ecclesiastes. So Kohelet seeks knowledge through his experience, and he uses that experience to validate it as well. Secondly, Kohelet does not privilege wisdom. Psalm 1 and Proverbs 1-9 talk about the two ways: the way of wisdom and the way of foolishness. You do everything you can to avoid the way of foolishness and to go the way of wisdom. Well, that’s not Kohelet’s approach. Kohelet wants to see where wisdom will take him, but he also wants to see where madness and folly will take him. So he doesn’t privilege wisdom. And this explains, I think, some of the negative consequences and conclusions he draws in the book. He’s really wrestling with the breakdown of the deed-consequence relationship. Third, Kohelet doesn’t bring God into the problems he is wrestling with. Two times in the book, he has an opportunity to do this. At the end of chapter three, he offers a theological reflection on God’s judgment, followed by an anthropological reflection on the relationship between humans and beasts. And he basically says that humans and beasts are no different. Their origin is the same, their destiny is the same, humans have no advantage over the beasts, and he leaves it there and goes right into a cause of enjoyment. He doesn’t bring up what he said about God to address this issue. In chapter nine, he says that the righteous and the wise are in the hand of God. Now, in the book of Psalms, if you’re in the hand of God, that is a place of security, that is a place of protection. But not so with Kohelet. In chapter nine, he goes on to say, it doesn’t really matter if you’re righteous or wicked. If you’re good or evil, you are treated the same way by God. So he doesn’t bring God into the problems he’s wrestling with.
And then say just a few words about the calls to enjoyment. The book begins with an important question. What profit is there to our labor? Is there any lasting benefit to our labor? He answers that question in chapter 2, verse 11, where he says, there is no profit to our labor. There is no lasting benefit to our labor, which is very different than what Proverbs 14:23 says. But then, in the previous verse, chapter 2, verse 10, he does say that there is something from our labor that we should benefit from and enjoy. And he uses a word which can be translated as “portion.” There’s a portion of our labor that we should at least enjoy. Now, that word becomes connected to the calls to enjoyment, which means that the calls to enjoyment in the book are not the answer of faith. They’re the only thing we can expect in a world that doesn’t work out the way we want it to. So what are we to do with this negative assessment of the world we live in?
Well, what if Solomon wrote the first-person discourse? Chapter 1, verse 2, and chapter 1, verse 12, seem to identify the author as Solomon. And what if it’s the private memoir written by him in a local dialect, not in the official standard biblical Hebrew, during that period of his life when his foreign wives turned his heart away from the Lord? That would explain a lot of the struggle that he’s going through. And a wise man comes along and takes it and presents it to his son and to others to warn us of the danger of speculative wisdom, but also to explain how someone like Solomon, the wisest man at that time on the earth, ended up the way he did. Certainly, the book of Ecclesiastes gives us a true assessment of living in a fallen world apart from God. The meaninglessness of life, taken up in the keyword hevel, is referred to in Romans 8, where Paul uses the Greek word mataites, a translation of hevel, and speaks of creation as futility there. And the good news is that Christ has delivered us from the futility of living in this fallen world, and we can have true meaning in life through Christ.
