Ecclesiastes: True or Meaningless? Re-Reading One of the Bible’s Most Difficult Books Through The Eyes of Ancient Scribes
About Aaron’s Research:
Ancient Jewish scribes did not write any part of the Bible by the standards of coherence or incoherence that govern modern authorship, nor did they occupy the same thought world as their modern readers. These scribes worked within inherited literary traditions, employed both simple and complex design conventions, and—as much as we can tell—expected their immediate historical readers to bring a specific set of reading competencies to the text as it was read, studied, and recited. This project examines how the scribes of Ecclesiastes organised the book’s material, and how (and to what degree) that organisation elucidates meaning.
But what happens when one reads a book as complicated as Ecclesiastes (Qohelet)? Notorious for its surface contradictions, often opaque phrases, dissonant theological claims, and seemingly pessimistic outlook on life, Ecclesiastes has been fraught with controversy and interpretative difficulty for nearly two millennia. With little consensus about what it means, when it was written, or why, Ecclesiastes is in many respects an ideal case study for a project such as this.
A recovery of the scribal conventions, literary design, and rhetorical strategies of Ecclesiastes is, however, only the first step. This reconstruction will aid an attempt to link the compositional poetics to the intellectual history of Second Temple Judaism, and show that Ecclesiastes was not alone in its poetics or ideological concerns within Second Temple Judaism. Together, these offer a reconstruction of the poetics and worldview behind Ecclesiastes: the interpretive keys that have always given it meaning and significance.
About Aaron:
Aaron J. Shaw is a PhD researcher in Hebrew Bible and Ancient Judaism at the University of St Andrews. His research seeks to recover, as much as possible, the underlying native compositional poetics of ancient Jewish literature- its literary conventions, structural techniques, and analogical strategies of textual production. He holds a BS from the University of Minnesota and has completed postgraduate coursework at Western Seminary and Harvard Divinity School. At the University of St Andrews, he tutors and holds a research assistantship.
Turn to any page of the Hebrew Bible (also known as the Old Testament or the Jewish Bible), and you may find yourself amid a cross-cultural experience. The texts of ancient Judaism were crafted over nearly a millennium, cover an array of important topics (rescue, death, family relations) and relevant concerns (forced migration, famine, suffering), and were composed in various modes (poetry, legal codes, narrative epics). They were even written in several ancient languages. Emerging clarity in biblical studies research demonstrates that ancient Jewish scribes did not write any part of the Bible by the standards of coherence or incoherence that govern modern authorship, nor did they occupy the same thought world as their modern readers. These scribes worked within inherited literary traditions, employed both simple and complex design conventions, and—as much as we can tell—expected their immediate historical readers to bring a specific set of reading competencies to the text as it was read, studied, and recited. But what happens when one reads a book as complicated as Ecclesiastes (Qohelet)?
The Difficulty of Ecclesiastes
Notorious for its surface contradictions, often opaque phrases, dissonant theological claims, and seemingly pessimistic outlook on life, Ecclesiastes has been fraught with controversy and interpretative difficulty for nearly two millennia. The book sits at a pivotal moment in Jewish intellectual history (the Second Temple era, c.500 BCE to 70 CE). The questions asked during this time were not insignificant: How does Israel’s God relate to the hidden, inscrutable forces that seem to govern human experience? What can human beings know, and how? How, then, are humans to live?
These questions, together with little consensus about what Ecclesiastes means, when it was written, or why, make it, in many respects, an ideal case study. Rather than attempting to reconstruct the history of events influencing the textual production of Ecclesiastes, this project examines how the scribes of Ecclesiastes organised the book’s material, and how (and to what degree) that organisation elucidates meaning. The method, then, is rightly considered historical compositional poetics, since it seeks to understand the historical scribal conventions that govern how a text means, thereby rendering scribes’ worldviews tangible.
True or Meaningless?
With a historical compositional poetics approach, the text’s patterning, symmetries, repetitions, and analogical correspondences are analysed as potentially deliberate intellectual work rather than decorative ornamentation. Take, for example, the introductory unit of Ecclesiastes 1:3–11:
At first glance, the unit has a cadence: a subject is introduced, followed by an explanation of how that subject is ceaseless or unending. One may even feel compelled to call it a poem. But if it is a poem, what exactly are we to make of it? Much scholarship has argued that Ecclesiastes 1:3–11 distils to the idea that everything is banal, repetitive, and even meaningless—so goes the world. However, a historical compositional poetics approach solicits a different set of questions: Did the scribes arrange these subjects in any specific or productive way? Does a deeper analogy operate among the subjects in relation to their characterisation as “ceaseless”? Is there a patterning or symmetry in the unit’s analogical thought? Is Ecclesiastes 1:3–11 truly a poem, or does the unit invite further demarcation? These questions are not exhaustive, but they convey a common premise: the arrangement of the textual material may indeed be key to understanding how the text means.
The analysis demonstrates that Ecclesiastes 1:3–11 divides reasonably into three parts, a triad: 1:3, 1:4–8, and 1:9–11. Eccl. 1:3 opens with a rhetorical question about the enduring value of human labour “under the sun,” that is, during one’s lifetime. This question receives an indirect answer in 1:9, where the same interrogative “what” opens the next section. Rather than addressing the value of human labour directly, 1:9 states that “What has been—it is what will be; what has been done—it is what will be done; there is nothing new under the sun.” The scribal concern in Ecclesiastes 1:10–11 is that something can only be “new” if one has a failure of memory—it has existed in some form already. Each generation lacks remembrance of those who came before, and the generation to come will fare no better, so no lasting or enduring memory proves achievable. Rather than answering the opening question, 1:9–11 transposes its concerns and introduces a more intricate set of ideas about human memory and cosmic cyclicality. It may be no accident that in Hebrew the word for “enduring value” rhymes phonetically with the word for “remembrance” (yitrôn / zikrôn), which may be a subtle lexical correspondence comparing the unachievable permanence of human labour to the inability of humans to remember those who preceded them, or grasp the idea that the cosmos is cyclical.
At the centre of Eccl 1:3 and 1:9–11 stands what this project considers to be the poem: 1:4–8. Its symmetry operates not through simple word distribution but through the way the poetic images, their domains, and their spatiality are analogically correspondent across its three sub-units: 1:4–5, 1:6, and 1:7–8.
The opening unit presents a contrasting depiction of human generations dying and living, rendered spatially as going down and coming up. That same spatial logic then reverses to describe the sun rising and setting. The third unit in 1:7–8 mirrors this movement: rivers go out and return without ever filling the sea, while human sensory organs take in the world through their processes and are never satisfied. More striking still, 1:4–5 moves from the human domain to the natural world, while 1:7–8 reverses the same sequence, placing the natural world first, then human sensory organs. At the centre, 1:6 presents a single poetic image: the wind, which circles and circles in an overtly repetitive construction. Together, these few textual features already demonstrate that the poem is not to highlight cosmic banality but to demonstrate that human life and the processes of the natural world are hardly distinguishable. The cosmos the scribes depict is cyclical, and human beings are as cyclical as everything else within it. Nowhere does the poem offer ethics or moral judgment atop this cosmic vignette. It presents comparisons, contrasts, and textual elements for the reader to meditate on at the outset of the book.
Re-Reading Ecclesiastes
As briefly demonstrated above, reconstructing the compositional poetics of Ecclesiastes requires a methodical, section-by-section reading of the book. Recovering the scribal conventions, literary design, and rhetorical strategies of Ecclesiastes is, however, only the first step. As far as possible, this reconstruction will aid an attempt to link the compositional poetics to the intellectual history of Second Temple Judaism and, consequently, offer a more robust portrait of the worldview in which the book was produced. These contours will attempt to show that Ecclesiastes was not alone in its poetics or ideological concerns within Second Temple Judaism.
There is a growing conversation about how ancient Jewish scribes produced literature and shaped thought. Thus, this project finds its place within that conversation. The question of what Ecclesiastes argues and what it expects its readers to perceive is not singular but vastly pluriform, and, by nature, necessitates a recovery of the complexity of native compositional poetics. Together, these offer a reconstruction of the poetics and worldview behind Ecclesiastes: the interpretive keys that have always given it meaning and significance.
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