This too shall pass. This too is hebel. One of the fundamental facts of life itself is that life is unfair. Conventional wisdom posits that if you work hard, you will get a promotion. But what about when that does not happen? Perhaps anger. Perhaps resentment. Or perhaps, you murmur a silent protest to yourself, like, “well that sucks.”
Qoheleth reminds us that ultimately, God is in control. God will judge everyone. But is that a good thing? Can we even trust God’s judgment? It would appear that, for Qoheleth, we cannot anticipate justice, at least not in this lifetime. Qoheleth himself seems confused by the absence of justice and right.
In this post, I will introduce the pericope my thesis focuses on, with special attention given to the first few verses.
Under the Sun: The Hebel World
What is life under the sun? What happens in the domain of earthly creatures? And what defines such a world? Twenty-nine times Qoheleth says “under the sun.” Like hebel, with thirty-eight occurrences, it is obviously of some importance.
For Qoheleth, the answer to the previous questions is almost simple. Almost, because if it weren’t, my thesis would have been much shorter. But there is one thing Qoheleth observes several times: all is hebel (1:2; 12:8; cf. 1:14; 2:17; 3:16). Everything under the sun: hebel.
That phrase, “all is hebel,” occurs too many times for Qoheleth to not deeply mean it. All is defined by this one word. We can all agree, at least I hope we can, that there is indeed beauty in life. A wedding. A graduation. A birth, and subsequent birthdays. There is much in life that is beautiful.
Then there’s cancer. There’s crime. There’s corruption. There are corrupt politicians, pastors, teachers, the list goes on. Nobody knows when they will suddenly stop breathing. Nobody knows when a conversation may be the very last. And nobody even knows whether they will wake up the next day.
Chaos. Violence. Death, destruction, and despair… it surrounds us. It always has. Even a Wisdom teacher in ancient Jerusalem recognized it. Not much has changed since then.
Qoheleth is deeply observational. The book begins with observations of the wind, seas, seeing, hearing, and so on. And for some, the message of Ecclesiastes begins exactly at 3:16. Why?
There’s the prologue in Ecclesiastes 1. The royal autobiography in chapter 2. The famous Times Poem immediately follows (3:1–8). And a bit of a commentary on that poem (3:9–15). And then we jump right in. Before we know it, we are in Qoheleth’s hebel world.
As I will argue, the dissonance Qoheleth finds between the lived reality of unchecked oppression and the hope of a distant divine action deepens his crisis. The world is not chaotic to “prepare us” or strengthen us. The world is chaotic precisely because that is the order God has established on earth. Again, God certainly exists for Qoheleth. And God is powerful. But what do we make of the jarring gap between this power and God’s non-intervention?
The Perversion of Order
From henceforth, all Scripture citations from Ecclesiastes 3:16–5:8 are my own, unless otherwise noted. My primary source is the Biblia Hebraica Quinta (BHQ), the standard scholarly version of the Masoretic Text.
In the “first” post of this series, I asked you to leave your picket signs where you find them—because the protest I am arguing for is not political. Let’s return to that thought for a moment. If we accept the “message” of Ecclesiastes as beginning at 3:16, then how does it begin? It begins with a forensic examination of life under the sun.
“And furthermore, I saw under the sun: in the meqom hamishpat(“place of justice”), wickedness was there, and in the place of righteousness, wickedness was there.” Ecc. 3:16.
This is an example of Qoheleth provoking that response in the reader of, “Huh? That’s not the way this should be.” Order would traditionally be definitional of the two places he mentions: the “place of justice” and the “place of righteousness.” And yet, it is precisely here that he finds wickedness.
If we look at this as a mirror, what does it reveal? What does the perversion of the “place of justice” reveal about the moral fabric of the world “under the sun”? There is an obvious disjunction here. Justice should exist in the place of justice, NOT wickedness. This creates a sense of the dissonance Qoheleth will name. As I write in the official thesis,
“The problem is not that wickedness exists, but that it exists with impunity in the spaces dedicated to its antithesis, raising critical questions about divine oversight and retributive justice.”
The Problem of Divine Judgment
Faced with this bleak reality, Qoheleth seeks some sort of resolve. He writes, in 3:17, “I said to myself, ‘The righteous and the wicked God will judge (yishpot); for there is a time for every matter, and concerning every deed.’” At first glance, this is exactly what we want. My fundamentalist upbringing would encourage me to read this as: “See? It sucks for the moment, but our God is eventually going to make it all right!”
If only Qoheleth were so simple. For Choon-Leong Seow, an essential scholar of Ecclesiastes, this judgment unfolds entirely on God’s time, not according to human expectation. Conversely, for Peter Enns, another essential Ecclesiastes scholar, this self-reflection borders more on being a “shallow consolation” or even an “outright taunt” (p. 57).
On God’s Absence: How Bold of a Claim is This?
If you are a believer, I imagine I am making you quite uncomfortable right now. I am telling you that an author of God’s word is pissed at God, or rather, that God is absent amidst the chaos on earth. And that is indeed true. But I want to remind you that my goal is not to turn you into an angsty agnostic or atheist.
As I have mentioned before, a “hidden God” is not a deeply radical idea. The Deus absconditus is connected with Martin Luther. Isaiah 45:15 literally says that God hides. I believe some radical things, and I make some radical claims; this is not one such example. A hidden God does not disprove God or the Bible. In fact, it is an art.
The Art of Reticence
For Robert Alter, whose work is foundational to this study, the Hebrew Bible often demonstrates an “art of reticence;” that is, the purposeful silence that leaves the sufferer to find meaning in a world where God does not speak. In this framework, one seeks God but only finds a barrier placed between God and humanity.
And Ecclesiastes 3:16–22 certainly embodies that barrier. As established, he finds wickedness where justice and righteousness should be guaranteed. Then, in 3:17, he tells himself that God will judge them all. In 3:18, he says God is testing us. His conclusion? The fate of animals and humans are the same; humans have no advantage over animals. This is a crazy paradox. ‘Wickedness exists in the places of justice and righteousness; God will judge everyone eventually; God is currently testing everyone; therefore, humans and animals are the same.’ That’s a lot to take in.
A Divine Test
Maybe I’m just that crazy, but I think it all makes perfect sense, actually. Here’s how I read this section:
In 3:16, we are presented with an absence of justice and righteousness. In place of the two? Wickedness. However, on the surface, it seems as though God’s eventual “judging” in 3:17 becomes a traditional affirmation of divine justice. It does not.
Qoheleth is observing a crisis. A crisis of theodicy, moreover. In his mind, he wants to believe that God will eventually make right what is wrong. He said to himself that God “is judging them.” But one sentence later, he also says to himself that God is “testing” them.
The verb often translated as “testing” (lebaram) in 3:18 is notoriously difficult to translate.
For one scholar, Melanie Peetz, lebaram typically carries a positive connotation of “singling out” or “selecting” for elevation. Honey, bring out the fine china. This is Qoheleth’s fine china. Such an approach, I find, carries some biting sarcasm that complicates the image: God “singles out” humans only to show them that they are in no way different from beasts. Human life is no more sacred than the chicken you had for dinner. This alleged “elevation,” as such, becomes a grim parody of exaltation.
This “test” ultimately produces what Seow calls the “leveling effect of death” (p. 175). That is, death is the true equalizer. Death is what actually levels the playing field. Humans having an advantage over animals? Why, because we can build temples and write books? In the end, we all end up in the same place. This leads to Qoheleth’s first use of hebel in the pericope my thesis addresses.
Not “this too is hebel.” Instead, “for all is hebel.” All. Everything. Every word on this page, every breath you’ve taken reading it, every single blink you have made. It is all hebel. Because this is a hebel world.
Conclusion
Where is God? That’s my question. God is named on the page, but where is God? Whether humans are absolutely no different from animals or whether they just share the same fate as animals, the result is the same. Either way, the human subject is left confronting a cosmic indictment on the value of life itself. This leads to a sense of existential ambiguity and a fractured observation on what it means, if it means anything at all, to be human.
And hebel? Hebel functions as a label for a world where divine hiddenness clouds any question about justice or the value of life. In such a world, evil exists in the place of righteousness, humans are no better than animals, and all go to the same place (3:20).
In the Bible, I will tell you exactly what we expect to find: hope of consolation. We expect God to wipe evil off the map, like in the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, or in the book of Amos. We expect God to be near to the brokenhearted and crushed in spirit (Psalm 34:18). That God will be the one to lead us out of the wilderness. That the light shines in the darkness, but the darkness does not overcome it (John 1:5).
That is what makes this uncomfortable. That God is not a comforting presence here, which is what we often hope to find. I know I do not find that, at least. All is hebel, and God’s “action” is to show us that we are nothing. That is hardly a comforting thought. And it only gets worse.
