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PDF FormatAn appreciation for joy grows steadily out of such an understanding. In truth, Judaism has long recognized its spiritual value. For example, the Talmud teaches that divine inspiration cannot be attained in a state of sadness, for it dwells only in a mind that has trained itself in joy.47 Many centuries later, the Hasidic sage Rabbi Nahman of Breslav taught that it is a great thing always to be in a state of joy. As Kohelet writes: “Rejoice, O lad, in your childhood, let your mind elevate you in the days of your youth… clear your mind of grievance and relieve your body of harm.…”48 To Kohelet, joy is not a consolation prize, or an elixir for life’s pains. Neither is it related to the promise of a life to come. Rather, joy is a value in and of itself; it is what it means to be truly alive.49
Yet even joy, it seems, is not the final destination for Kohelet. Ultimately, if there is an underlying message in the book of Ecclesiastes, it is this: That only in understanding the transience of life do we attain the beginning of wisdom; and in turn, only through the wisdom derived from our experience of life may we in some way take part in that which is eternal. The importance of wisdom is mentioned repeatedly in Ecclesiastes: “Wisdom excels folly as light excels darkness”;50 “Wisdom preserves the lives of its possessors”;51 “Wisdom empowers the wise”;52 “A man’s wisdom illuminates his face, and its power is transformed.”53 Moreover, Kohelet refers to man’s judgment before God when one inevitably leaves this world. It is in this context that he provides his most important conclusion regarding the nature of wisdom: “I say, dwell upon the King’s commandment, and discourse of God’s covenant.… He who follows the commands will avoid misconceptions; come the hour of judgment, he will know a wise mind.”54 Kohelet realizes that true wisdom is the one thing that is not dependent on transient circumstances. Yet all of the transient circumstances in this world serve as the means of acquiring it. This was the meaning of Abel’s life, which served as the inspiration for the book of Ecclesiastes.55
This ultimate lesson—fleeting life yielding eternal truth—touches on the very core of the Bible’s imagery. It is found in the book of Exodus, at the very point where Moses begins his own spiritual path. A shepherd like his forefathers, he is tending his flock when he comes across an amazing revelation: “And the Angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire from the midst of a bush. So he looked, and behold, the bush was burning with fire, but the bush was not consumed. Then Moses said, ‘I will now turn aside and see this great sight, why the bush does not burn...’”56 In the burning bush, Moses perceived the powerful image of ephemeral, physical existence sustaining in it a fire of the eternal, two realities which seemingly cannot coexist but in truth are inseparable. Moses would himself come to resemble this image, when, having heard the word of God on Mount Sinai, descending from the mountain, now his own temporal, fleeting body radiating the eternal light.57 Indeed, the Zohar affirms this connection when it states that Moses was a reincarnation of Abel.58 This parable linking Abel with the greatest biblical prophet validates the hidden promise of hevel, which, as we have seen, is Ecclesiastes’ central innovation. “Fleeting transience,” concludes Kohelet, “fleeting transience, it is all thin air.” Yet at the core of such thorny transience, we find a timeless flame.
Everything but wisdom is transient, teaches the king, and history has proven him right. Neither Solomon’s riches, nor his power, nor even his monumental temple in Jerusalem survived under the sun. What has indeed lasted, however, is the legacy of his wisdom, embodied in the book of Ecclesiastes. This belief in knowledge as the highest form of spirituality has served as the Jewish torch throughout the ages. And no small measure of that light is reflected in the understanding that only ideas can defy time, transforming the world.
Ethan Dor-Shav is an Associate Fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem. He is currently working on a study of the soul in the Hebrew Bible. His last essay in AZURE was “The Israel Museum and the Loss of Jewish Memory” (AZURE 5, Autumn 1998).
Notes
The author wishes to express his deep gratitude to Professor Menachem Fisch, who opened that door so many years ago.
1. For the purpose of this essay, it is of little significance whether or not the historical king Solomon actually wrote the work of Ecclesiastes. It is clear both from the opening verse and from numerous other examples that its author intended it to be read as a statement of Solomon’s wisdom.
2. Ecclesiastes 2:17-21. All verse translations are mine, based on the New King James Version.
3. Although mistaking hevel for “emptiness,” Rami Shapiro fleshes out the pro-joy theme in his The Way of Solomon: Finding Joy and Contentment in the Wisdom of Ecclesiastes (San Francisco: Harper, 2000). Other scholars have also alluded to this theme, albeit sporadically; see, for example, Daniel C. Fredericks, who writes of Kohelet’s “timely laughter, dancing and embracing, and love and peace,” in Coping with Transience:Ecclesiastes on Brevity in Life(Sheffield: jsot, 1993), p. 68.
4. Ecclesiastes 3:22.
5. Ecclesiastes 8:15.
6. Ecclesiastes 9:7.
7. I Kings 4:20.
8. Ecclesiastes 2:13, 7:12, 7:19, 8:1-5, and elsewhere.
9. Indeed, the Talmud tells us how the rabbis considered suppressing the entire book as a result of its apparent inner contradictions. Shabbat 30b.
10. M. James Sawyer, “The Theology of Ecclesiastes,” Biblical Studies Foundation website, www.bible.org/docs/ot/books/ecc/theoecc.htm.
11. Cf. Giorgio de Santillana, Hamlet’s Mill: An Essay on Myth and the Frame of Time (Boston: David Godine, 1994).
12. Cf. Jan Assmann, The Mind of Egypt: History and Meaning in the Time of the Pharaohs (New York: Metropolitan, 2002); Serge Sauneron, The Search for God in Ancient Egypt, trans. David Lorton (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell, 2000).
13. The Koran, trans. N.J. Dawood (Middlesex: Penguin, 1974), 78:31, p. 53.
14. John Woodroffe, in his introduction to The Tibetan Book of the Dead, explains, “The after-death apparitions are ‘real’ enough for the deceased.” (London: Oxford, 1960), p. lxxiii.
15. Cf. Maimonides, Mishneh Tora, Laws of Repentance 8:6.
16. From the entry for “Biblical Literature” in Encyclopaedia Britannica (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2003), vol. xiv, p. 951.
17. From the Latin Vanitas vanitatum omina vanitas, Jerome’s Latin Vulgate (405 a.d.).
18. Genesis 4:1-8.
19. Ecclesiastes 12:5-8. The word hevel, moreover, resembles a number of Hebrew roots clearly dealing with demise over time: “And we all do wither (navel) as a leaf”(Isaiah 64:5); “They shall perish... all of them shall wear out (yivlu)... and they shall pass” (Psalms 102:27); “And your dead shall live; corpses (nevelati) shall arise... (Isaiah 26:19). This root, moreover, finds cognates in Old South Arabian, where blwt is “grave”; the Ugaritic bly and the Ethopic balya (“to be consumed”); and the Akkadian balu (“to fade, pass away”). Cf. Cyrus H. Gordon, Ugaritic Textbook, entry #471; ZAW 75:307; Ludwig Koehler and Walter Baumgartner, The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament (Boston: Brill, 2001), p. 132.
20. Isaiah 45:17.
21. Deuteronomy 33:29.
22. Exodus 14:30.
23. Cf. Numbers 6:26. This teaching, it should be noted, rejects the pagan view of a mechanistic element to worship and sacrifice, according to which humans manipulate the gods through ritual, independent of their purity of intentions.
24. Abel, however, might very well have been the first to take a life: Whereas Cain’s sacrifice was a portion of his harvest, Abel’s was an animal. In light of the questions of life and death that pervade his story, this fact takes on new meaning. In sacrificing an animal’s life, Abel ascertained a higher value: Something for which it is worth forfeiting a life.
25. Genesis 46:34.
26. Genesis 47:3.
27. Indeed, the thread runs through Genesis 4:25-26: “And Adam knew his wife again, and she bore a son and named him Seth, ‘For God has appointed another seed for me instead of Hevel, whom Cain killed.’ And as for Seth, to him also a son was born; and he named him Enosh; then [man] began to call on the name of the Lord....” The very next person to “call on the name of the Lord” was Abraham (Genesis 13:4), further solidifying the link between Abel and the Jewish people.
28. Translations of hevel as “fleeting” have appeared in the past. Notably, the Jewish Publication Society Bible—as opposed to the Artscroll and Judaica Press renditions—translates verse 11:10 as “youth and black hair are fleeting.” The JPS version, in fact, goes even further, substituting “fleeting” for the appearances of hevel in 6:12 and 9:9. However, these are clearly exceptions resulting from the misreading of re’ut ruah, and not the consistent rule. See note 29 below.
Furthermore, Christian readings have referred to the etymological root of the word, whose meaning is close to that of vapor or steam, in an effort to explain the source of Ecclesiastes’ hevel as a metaphor for the insubstantial: Daniel Lys calls it the “present but evanescent.” Lys, Ecclesiastes, or What is Life Worth? Translation, General Introduction, and Commentary on 1/1 to 4/3 (Paris: Letouzey, 1977), pp. 75, 275, A. Heler (7:6)calls hevel “all that is doomed, by its very essence, to disappear.” [French] Notes on Kohelet (Paris, 1951), p. 72 [French]; and Jean-Luc Marion determines the word to mean “all that is can dissipate,” then explains in the context of this discussion that “man finds himself carried away by the breath of his own defeat.” Cited in Jean-Luc Marion, God Without Being, trans. Thomas A. Carlson (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1991), pp. 125-126.
All of these readings, however, while understanding hevel to mean the transient nature of vapor, still see the borrowed use as implying worthlessness, or vanity, rather than the objective, non-pejorative, fleeting reality of mortal life. Some scholars use “transience” in some verses but not in others (as is the case in the JPS Bible). These include Douglas B. Miller, in his Symbol and Rhetoric in Ecclesiastes: The Place of Hevel in Kohelet’s Work (Leiden: Brill, 2002), p. 180, who concludes that “some aspects of human existence, even humans themselves, are insubstantial, while other things are transient, and others are foul.” The admirable exception is found in Daniel C. Fredericks’ treatise, Coping with Transience, in which he notes correctly the presence of ephemeral efforts, passing pleasures, and transient tragedies, while insisting on linguistic and symbolic consistency throughout Ecclesiastes. But even here, as is evident from the title, transience is viewed as innately problematic: It is, according to Fredericks, part of “a cursed world.” Fredericks, Coping with Transience, p. 11. This becomes evident in the tone of his conclusion as well: Kohelet “also depends heavily on joy of work, even strenuous labor, to counterbalance the pains of a fleeting world which consists only as moments.” Fredericks, Coping with Transience, p. 97. What is missing in Fredericks’ analysis is the awareness of Kohelet’s existential revolution—that is, Fredericks does not concede the fact of an all-encompassing transience as the positive message—and the intellectual development within the book that eventually embraces the fleeting nature of pain, suffering, evil, and even death itself.At the opposite pole we find Rami Shapiro, who turns transience into the be-all and end-all of existence. Though there is much to respect in his radical Taoist reading of Ecclesiastes, which correctly integrates core insights in the book (“Nothing lasts, Solomon tells us, and that is the most liberating truth of all,” p. 119), he lacks the linguistic proficiency to decode its systematic terminology, hence missing Kohelet’s rationalistic metaphysics. Shapiro asserts that the literal meaning of hevel (“breath,” in his view) connotes the “fleeting, ephemeral, impermanent” (p. 96), but he then takes the leap to seeing hevel as a metaphoric signifier of a greater Taoist idea of “emptiness.” Thus, even Kohelet’s first encounters with transience, explicitly causing him to hate life (Ecclesiastes 2:17), are colored by Shapiro with detached contemplativeness (“how foolish this quest for permanence”; p. 27). Indeed, “emptiness” implies “empty of permanence” (p. 2), but, for Shapiro, it encompasses a much more radical negation of an eternal “self,” creation, God’s judgment, and ultimately wisdom as the crux of redemption. All in all, Shapiro’s imaginative rendering is too deliberately loose, with respect to the Hebrew, to be of concrete interpretive use.
Nevertheless, both Fredericks and Shapiro offer landmark steps in rescuing Ecclesiastes from sixteen centuries of misreading. I believe that a sensitive, intertextual biblical approach, as well as a structured approach towards Ecclesiastes’ take on natural philosophy (in dialogue with other, pre-Socratic elemental cosmologies), constitutes the golden path that balances both their readings in search of Ecclesiastes’ straightforward, original intent.
29. In objecting to this value-neutral definition of hevel, the most common claim is the repeated use of the phrase “hevel and re’ut ruah,” which is traditionally translated as “vanity and (the innately futile) pursuit of wind.” However, this treatment of re’ut ruah (a term unique to Ecclesiastes) misreads the original Hebrew at least as much as does the translation of hevel as “vanity.” Scholars are in agreement about rejecting the old notion of re’ut as “vexation of spirit,” in favor of translations that see re’ut as a reflex of ra’ah. Nonetheless, the continuing misconception misses the core meaning of this precise root-verb, “to meander”; feeding, grazing, and herding are secondary transpositions. Critically, the Hebrew root ra’ah does not imply gathering, chasing, or herding-in; rather, it connotes the typical (outward-bound) movement of grazing over pasturelands. This is why the verb can easily apply to the roaming of a single animal, with no flock or shepherd about. Cf. Genesis 41:1-2; Song of Songs 4:5, 6:2. Similarly, it applies where no feeding is involved; cf. Numbers 14:33. Hence, even if we knew no more than this, re’ut is to be understood as a fleeting movement of wind, or air, such as a gust or a breeze. This is cognate to tir’eh-ruah in Jeremiah 22:22 (“a puff of wind,” or “scattered by the wind”). Thus, a close approximation of the phrase hevel u’re’ut ruach, would be “vapor and a stirring of air,” or “vapor and a puff of wind.” In this light, the entire idiom stresses transient phenomena, of no material value. However, the etymology of re’ut itself may give us a clue to uncovering its original connotation; for its Semitic root had an additional meaning, one with a close affinity to the word “vapor.” While the Hebrew language lost this variant, it survives to this day in Arabic: The Arabic root of r-gh-w, as in the noun ragha—froth or foam—and the verb ragha—to froth. Like vapor, it is a potent metaphor of fleeting, passing phenomena. Froth and foam, of course, are made of air, which in the biblical Hebrew is always ruah, bringing us back again to Ecclesiastes’ idiom, “hevel ure’ut ruah,” which we may now render: Vapor and froth (cf. Shakespeare, The Rape of Lucrece: “What win I if I gain the thing I seek? A dream, a breath, a froth of fleeting joy”).
This also helps us to understand Ecclesiastes 4:6, where re’ut ruah is depicted as something that, figuratively, one can grab “handfuls” of, albeit without much gain; of course, one cannot grab a “pursuit of” anything in one’s hand. Moreover, the two parts of the idiom, vapor and froth, become nouns corresponding to two physical entities (re’ut ruah as object rather than action). As a result, the entire phrase, hevel ure’ut ruah, constitutes a uniform, objective, double-metaphor about the factual transience of human life and worldly achievements.
Finally, it is difficult to ignore the striking similarity between Abel the shepherd (hevel ro’eh, Genesis 4:2), and the form of hevel ure’ut: Just as Kohelet succeeded in bringing Abel’s mortality to mind with the simile of vapor, so, too, “froth” (or “gust”) recalls the core characteristic of Abel’s impermanent life.
30. Ecclesiastes 12:8.
31. Note that the Greek term in the Septuagint from which the Latin vanitas derives has the alternative meaning of “transitory” or “illusory,” in addition to that of “empty” or “pointless.” This ambiguity is likely the source of the word’s erroneous use in later interpretations.
32. Ecclesiastes 9:9.
33. Ecclesiastes 8:10.
34. Ecclesiastes 8:14.
35. Ecclesiastes 2:22.
36. Franz Rosenzweig, Star of Redemption, trans. William Hallo (Notre Dame: Notre Dame, 1985), p. 3.
37. See “The Legend of the Buddha Shakyamuni,” in Buddhist Scriptures (Baltimore: Penguin, 1959), pp. 39-40.
38. Here Kohelet also begins to discuss the relativity of theories of knowledge. Ecclesiastes 6:8-12.
39. Ecclesiastes 4:8.
40. Ecclesiastes 7:6.
41. Ecclesiastes 6:3-6.
42. Kohelet Rabba 6:3.
43. Ecclesiastes 8:15, 11:9-12, 9:7-9.
44. Ecclesiastes 11:8.
45. As quoted by Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche; “The Last Teaching of the Buddha,” in The Teaching of the Buddha, 128th revised edition (Tokyo: Bukkyo Dendo Kyokai, 1986), accessed via trang.quoc.org/TheTeachingOfBuddha.htm#10.
46. Ecclesiastes 9:7-10.
47. “The Divine Presence does not rest among men in their sadness… but in their joy of the following of the commandments,” Shabbat 30b; and “The Holy Spirit dwells only in a heart filled with gladness,” Jerusalem Succah 5:1.
48. Ecclesiastes 11:9-10.
49. This is reminiscent, as well, of Aristotle’s “perfect condition.” Cf. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, book x.
50. Ecclesiastes 2:13.
51. Ecclesiastes 7:12.
52. Ecclesiastes 7:19.
53. Ecclesiastes 8:1.
54. Ecclesiastes 8:2-5. Although the concept of davar or lev lie beyond the scope of this essay, the translation of these verses relies on an understanding of the terms as consistent references to “teaching” (or “saying”) and “mind,” respectively. These terms highlight Ecclesiastes’ advanced epistemology in verses such as 1:8,10, 5:1-2, 6:10-11, 8:1, and 12:13. Cf. Genesis 11:1.
55. It is interesting to note that the two biblical books attributed to Solomon, Proverbs and the Song of Songs, also have as a central focus the affirmation of youthful love and joy, and of wisdom, respectively.
56. Exodus 3:2-3.
57. Exodus 34:30-35.
58. Zohar 3:106a. This parable also draws on a sense of morality. Unlike Cain, and for that matter Adam, who toil inanimate soil, Abel was the first to pursue an intersubjective vocation, which tended to other living beings. Furthermore, through his death humanity learned, for the first time, of man’s moral obligation toward his fellow. This was a central element of Abel’s spirituality, and it is also manifest in Moses’ extraordinary care for the weakest of his lambs, which according to the Midrash, resulted in God’s entrusting Moses with his own flock, the people of Israel.
