Ecclesiastes Has a Public Relations Problem

Surely the fate of human beings is like that of the animals;
the same fate awaits them both:
As one dies, so dies the other
…humans have no advantage over animals.
Everything is meaningless.

The race is not to the swift
or the battle to the strong,
nor does food come to the wise
or wealth to the brilliant
or favor to the learned;
but time and chance happen
to them all.
As fish are caught in a cruel net,
or birds are taken in a snare,
so people are trapped by evil times
that fall unexpectedly upon them.

What to Do with Ecclesiastes?

The Book of Ecclesiastes has a problem. In truth, it has several,¹ but let us focus on its “public relations” problem, which has two aspects.

First, the book is a poem. More precisely, it is a collection of poems and aphorisms, glued together by strands of prose and shaped into a single treatise. And because half of us are allergic to poetry, we are handicapped in discerning poetry’s relationship to faith. This alienation constrains both scriptural literacy and spiritual nourishment. One-third of the Bible comes to us in verse. It is worth asking: Why?

The other half of its public relations problem is that Ecclesiastes is dour. Its tone splices sober and bleak. It declares everything “under the sun” (the achievement of wisdom and all lesser striving) to be futile. This, of course, seems at odds with the Restoration’s thrust. We aspiring Saints seek joy and relish purpose. We are an optimistic people, building Zion, whose gospel is Good News. We see God’s project as a “plan of happiness,” and we wish to encourage one another in its pursuit.

The poetic pessimism of Ecclesiastes thus contributes to the book’s neglect. Although we may have heard the quip “vanity of vanities, all is vanity” (1:2), and though we may recognize the scriptural source of periodically popular song lyrics (“To every thing, there is a season, and a time to every purpose under … heaven” [3:1]) or book titles (The Sun Also Rises, 1:5), still Ecclesiastes is not etched in our sensibilities. As a church community, we might sample a few chapters from the book on a single Sunday (if we are in attendance on the right one of 208 Sabbaths in our four-year curricular cycle and have read along with the church’s Come, Follow Me calendar). But rarely do we encounter the bulk of the book or probe its poetic wealth. We might go decades without hearing this scripture substantively engaged from a pulpit.

This near-absence of Ecclesiastes in our shared thought is arguably a deficit, for despite the book’s pessimism–in part because of its particular pessimism–it brims with insight, beauty, and a perspective that could contribute to our spiritual maturity. The great Latter-day Saint teacher, Lowell Bennion, who was also our church’s approximation of Mother Teresa during the second half of the 20^th century, held that Ecclesiastes was “the most realistic book in the Bible.” We could grapple with this assertion, but the book does in fact lend bracing perspectives that could complement other scripture and deepen our lives in the gospel amidst our vale of tears. The ancients, it is true, found reasons to exclude Ecclesiastes from the canon; it was among the last books to secure its place. At length, however, the devout found stronger reasons to include it. Again: why is that so?

How then shall we approach the somber, poetical pith of Ecclesiastes? How might we hold it together with our optimistic view of a purposeful life, a loving and redeeming Lord, and an exalted eternal horizon? Let us first revisit poetry’s connection to faith, then conclude by posing a prompt or two toward renewed thought about an old book.

I: Poetry as Obstacle

What is the source of our indifference to poetry?² For some, it lies in the effort required of reading unfamiliar forms. Poetry can seem dense or cryptic, demanding attention amidst our busyness. The obstacle of obscurity can feel all the larger if, as with the King James Bible, the language of the baseline text is antique quite before we tangle with its poetic portions.

Others discount poetic expression as inessential verbal tinsel. Why not say things plainly for all to understand? Why gild the lily of the pure and simple gospel? Surely clever or pretty words are less important than correct doctrine, unvarnished truth, and moral clarity. Viewed this way, poetry becomes luxury or distraction. A similar perspective helps explain why some Christian groups ban singing or the use of musical instruments during Sunday services. They fear that such frippery draws attention from worship and toward performance. For related reasons, we often insist that our visual gospel art be simple, illustrative, and didactic.

These are not vacuous concerns. As Nephi insisted, “plainness” can be precious. When we apply these notions unthoughtfully, however, we may diminish Zion and, ironically, thicken the veil twixt us and heaven. We do that by confusing the dangers of the distortion of art (self-aggrandizement, for example) with art itself. Preening may of course glom onto an expression of verbal or visual beauty, just as it can accompany the display of strength, wealth, intelligence, or authority. But the problem is not innate to beauty, authority, or intelligence. The problem is rooted in pride and unrighteous dominion.

While there is a spiritual cost wherever pride infringes, there is also a spiritual cost to bland or rote representations of our gospel. How is it possible to comprehend the gospel’s full splendor without engaging its fruits, including the art it naturally spawns?

In its authentic expression, poetry is not mere verbal decoration. Instead, it transforms the emotional and aesthetic character of diverse scriptural passages, revealing their power, awakening minds and hearts to the good and the true, the powerful and the beautiful. When the newly widowed (Moabite) Ruth pleads to remain with her (Israelite) mother-in-law Naomi, for example, the form and quality of her reported and translated speech (“Whither thou goest, I will go, and where thou lodgest, I will lodge;/Thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God”) is intrinsic to why the story lodges in our hearts across the centuries. So is it also with the Beatitudes in Matthew’s rendition of the sermon on the mount (5:3–12). And with the Magnificat spoken by Mary of Jesus’ coming birth, as portrayed by Luke (1:46–55). So it is with the Bible’s prophetic books. And so it is with its “wisdom literature,” including, especially, Ecclesiastes.

The music, imagery, metaphor, and compression that characterizes poetry, then, need not be in competition with the divine. To the contrary, poetry can partake of the sublime, conveying the taste, feel, pleasure, and idea of the sublime. Most of us would not wish for less graceful, less tasteful temples in which to worship and to enact our most sacred devotions. Neither ought we, by sloth or obliviousness, disdain inspiration in its poetic guise. However humble, varied, and surprising its forms may be, holiness warrants beautiful expression.

II: Hearing the Lord’s Song in a Strange Tune

But though we may acknowledge the place of poetry and the aesthetic of Ecclesiastes, how shall we hear the Lord’s song in a strange tune? That is, what shall we do with the eloquent book’s pessimistic outlook on the world?

Rather than presuming to de-canonize the book by spurning or ignoring it, we might consider coming to it in humility and with imagination–without which any scriptural work might end up on our de facto personal scrapheaps. What follows are a pair of sample prompts for reflection as we generate our own response to the question in the preceding paragraph.

Vapor, Not Vanity

The thought of the “Teacher” or “Preacher” that constitutes the book of Ecclesiastes begins and ends with a lament about human aspirations and human affairs: “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity” (1:2; 12:8).³ What is intended by “vanity” in this context has naturally attracted attention over the centuries. Modern English translations incline toward “futility,” “useless,” and “meaningless.” These provocative concepts do pick up on strands in the wider text of Ecclesiastes. However, the Hebrew word (hebel) behind them means something more like “mist” or “vapor,” “a puff of air.” Vanity, futility, meaningless, or emptiness are English-cast metaphorical extensions of the word’s Hebrew meaning: a vapor, which may imply “evanescence.” Taken this way, the thought that opens and closes Ecclesiastes may carry the sense of “ Life is as a fleeting vapor, which cannot be grasped.”

How would this rendition shade our reading of Ecclesiastes as a whole? Might this sense, crafted by the weary, poetic Teacher, be put in fruitful conversation with Jacob’s striking lament in The Book of Mormon?

And…I, Jacob, began to be old; …wherefore, I conclude this record…saying that the time passed away with us, and also our lives passed away like as it were unto us a dream, we being a lonesome and a solemn people, wanderers, cast out from Jerusalem, born in tribulation, in a wilderness, and hated of our brethren, which caused wars and contentions; wherefore, we did mourn out our days. (Jacob 7:26)

A Role for Uncertainty

We Latter-day Saints prize faith. We oft bear testimony of things we “know”: that God lives, that Jesus is the Christ, and that the Lord has restored his church, answers prayer, and will resurrect every person. Many additional things.

Ecclesiastes, by contrast, heaves with life’s uncertainties. The author doubts the world’s fairness, for ofttimes “the righteous … get what the wicked deserve, and the wicked … get what the righteous deserve” (8:14, NIV; cf. 9:11–12). God “has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end” (3:11, NIV), which seems to mourn that God has implanted a sense of the eternal and the divine inside human consciousness, but left us yearning, orphaned, and ignorant. For example, says our author, “Who knows if the human spirit rises upward and if the spirit of the animal goes down into the earth?” (3:21, NIV). Death is certain; little else. Not the fruits of one’s toil; not the endurance of wisdom; not the hope of being remembered; not the triumph of justice.

Ecclesiastes sings in a melancholy key. (This fact is not dissolved by our citing the second author who later appended his or her summary judgment to the body of the book, saying “here is the conclusion of the matter: Fear God and keep his commandments.”⁴) With its this-worldly focus and its disdain toward much of our human striving, Ecclesiastes cannot stand on its own as a sufficient expression of our hopeful, radiant gospel. But then neither can any other isolated scriptural book, including the canonized gospels or the books of the Book of Mormon. Therefore, might the skepticism, realism, and uncertainty of Ecclesiastes be a useful, though not sufficient, seasoning within our wider faith and canon?

Might it, for instance, like the book of Job, serve as a balancing corrective to the widely held assurance, in both ancient and modern times, that God will dependably prosper the righteous and punish the wicked in visible, material ways in mortality? (See common interpretations of such passages as Proverbs 11:31; 2:21–22; Mosiah 2:24; and Malachi 3:10–11.) Against this thought, and like Ecclesiastes, Jesus noticed that God “maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good [alike], and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust” (Matthew 5:45). If we are certain that it is otherwise, are we not too certain? And therefore, is not uncertainty (“I don’t know”) an adoptable principle within our wider faith? All of us who live long enough will collide or will know someone valiant and dear to us who collides with undeserved calamity bearing life-altering or life-ending results. Uncertainty and acceptance of such contingencies are not spiritual weaknesses. In such circumstances, embracing uncertainty may be the most trusting, faithful thing we can do. Moreover, excessive certainty can breed arrogance, sometimes at the expense of others. “When we know we don’t know fully, we are … more concerned about practical, loving behavior…. Those who know God are always humble; those who don’t are invariably far too sure of themselves (which is different than grace-filled self-confidence).”⁵

Conclusion

For thirty years and more I have worked to calm unease among college freshmen and sophomores (and their parents) when they don’t know in what field they wish to “major.” I have tried to persuade them that “not knowing yet” can be crucial, creative space.

Similarly, there is a place for uncertainty in our gospel. Were it not so, we might have arrived on earth unveiled–or we might not have bothered to come to a shrouded world at all. Uncertainty, though not always comfortable, may be mixed with curiosity, hope, and honesty, making for excellent soil from which trust or faith may sprout. Perhaps uncertainty in such a context is another term for openness.

Ecclesiastes is uncertain. In some respects, it is more: skeptical and contrary. It cannot be the last word for us. But let us make room for it in our real—that is, used—canon, like an antiphonal surprise in a symphony. Perhaps we may rediscover in it a functional, intentional, and dissonant chord in God’s wider hymn to us.