452: Qohelet Gets Out of Bed

Summary

Podcast Summary: The BEMA Podcast - Episode 452: "Qohelet Gets Out of Bed"

Introduction

In Episode 452 of The BEMA Podcast, titled "Qohelet Gets Out of Bed," hosts Marty Solomon and Brent Billings embark on an in-depth exploration of one of the least understood books of the Tanakh: Kohelet, commonly known as Ecclesiastes. This episode marks the beginning of a new series aimed at deconstructing and reconstructing biblical texts through their historical and philosophical contexts.

Overview of Kohelet / Ecclesiastes

The hosts introduce Kohelet, emphasizing its controversial status within the biblical canon. Josh Bossay leads the discussion, with theological insights from L. Grover Fricks, delving into why Kohelet has historically been questioned for its place in scripture.

Notable Quote:

[00:55] Marty Solomon: "This episode is titled Kohelet Gets out of Bed. And I didn't say a book of the Tanakh in my introduction. What in the world are we even talking about?"

Authorship Debate

A significant portion of the episode focuses on the authorship of Kohelet. Traditionally attributed to Solomon, the hosts challenge this notion by highlighting linguistic and thematic elements that suggest a post-exilic composition. Josh Bossay proposes a radical interpretation, suggesting that Kohelet could have been authored by a woman, thus adding layers to its philosophical and controversial content.

Notable Quote:

[20:10] L. Grover Fricks: "Gotta be Solomon. He didn't have any other sons."

Key Themes Discussed

1. Philosophical Tone: Kohelet is portrayed not merely as wisdom literature but as a work of concrete, experiential philosophy. Unlike other biblical genres that are narrative-driven or theologically centered, Kohelet engages directly with existential questions and the futility of human endeavors.

   Notable Quote:

   [05:04] Josh Bossay: "This is a book of philosophy. But unlike what we might think about, you know, some of the ways that the Bible speaks very broadly and speaks to philosophical questions, this is philosophical in its mode."

2. Individualism: The individualistic perspective of Kohelet is highlighted as both a reflection of the author's experience and a departure from communal cultural norms of the time. This lens allows for a more personal and introspective exploration of life's meaning.

   Notable Quote:

   [05:09] Josh Bossay: "And to oversimplify. So we have to understand a couple things. So first of all, this. This is a book of philosophy."

3. Humanistic Perspective: Kohelet's approach is fundamentally humanistic, focusing on life from a purely human standpoint without assuming divine providence or explicit theological directives. This perspective fosters a sense of existential inquiry and skepticism.

   Notable Quote:

   [10:01] Josh Bossay: "Kohelet's philosophical lens is very humanistic. And by that I mean that Kohelet is reasoning not from the point of view of God is always right."

Analysis of Chapter 1

The hosts delve into the opening chapter of Kohelet, unpacking its repetitive and cyclical imagery that underscores the theme of futility (hevel).

1. Verses 1-3: Introduction and Themes Kohelet introduces himself as a "teacher" or "preacher," emphasizing the book's introspective and philosophical nature. The repetition of "hevel" (often translated as "meaningless" or "vanity") sets the tone for the exploration of life's transient and insubstantial nature.

   Notable Quote:

   [15:35] Marty Solomon: "The words of the teacher, son of David King in Jerusalem. Meaningless. Meaningless, says the teacher. Utterly meaningless. Everything is meaningless."

2. Verses 4-11: Cyclical Imagery and Futility The discussion highlights the cyclical patterns in nature described by Kohelet—sunrise and sunset, wind directions, and river flows—each symbolizing the endless and fruitless repetition of life's endeavors.

   Notable Quote:

   [41:36] Josh Bossay: "Everything she's observed, everything that she's seen, again, these concrete metaphors are really important. She set her heart to do this, to just look at everything with wisdom."

3. Verses 12-18: Quest for Wisdom and Its Burden Kohelet shifts focus to his personal pursuit of wisdom, noting that increased knowledge brings increased sorrow. This introspection questions the very value of wisdom and whether it leads to true fulfillment or merely deeper existential despair.

   Notable Quote:

   [51:54] Josh Bossay: "With much wisdom comes much sorrow. The more knowledge, the more grief."

Personal Reflections from Hosts

Throughout the episode, the hosts interweave personal reflections that resonate with Kohelet's themes:

• Brent Billings emphasizes the challenge of applying wisdom without identifying the core problem, highlighting Kohelet's direct confrontation with nihilism.

  Notable Quote:

  [77:48] L. Grover Fricks: "I think that some of the genius of what Kohelet is doing here is bringing the problem into the fore, right? It's hard for us to apply wisdom if we can't identify the problem."

• Marty Solomon contemplates the modern relevance of Kohelet's assertion that "there is nothing new under the sun," juxtaposing it with the unprecedented access to information today.

  Notable Quote:

  [78:40] Marty Solomon: "I mean, thinking about this increase of knowledge that brings grief and sorrow, I struggle a lot with trying to figure out, like, how connected should I be with everything that's going on in the world."

Conclusion

In wrapping up the episode, Josh Bossay synthesizes the discussion by emphasizing Kohelet's invitation to engage deeply with one's purpose and calling, beyond mere obligation or habitual action. He suggests that true fulfillment arises from a heartfelt exploration of one's existential questions, aligning with Kohelet's humanistic and philosophical inquiry.

Notable Quote:

[85:28] Josh Bossay: "It's something that she is going to experience for herself to get deeper into In a human way, not in an intellectual way, she's actually going to go out and experience this."

The episode effectively sets the stage for a nuanced and profound journey through Kohelet, promising listeners an intellectually stimulating exploration of one of the Bible's most enigmatic books.

Additional Resources

• Show Notes: Accessible at baymonddiscipleship.com or through your preferred podcast app.
• Contact & Support: Find contact options and support the ministry through the website's contact page.

Closing Remarks

The hosts express gratitude to listeners for joining them on this intellectual and spiritual journey, encouraging continued engagement and exploration in future episodes.

Notable Quote:

[86:19] Marty Solomon: "Everything we do is made possible by listeners like you who have joined us on this journey."

Stay tuned for upcoming episodes where Marty, Brent, Josh, and L. Grover Fricks will continue to dissect and discuss the profound themes of Kohelet, offering fresh insights and practical applications for modern life.

Transcript

[Marty Solomon]

Foreign. This is the Bama podcast with Marty Solomon. I'm his co host, Brent Billings. Today we are launching an exploration of one of the least understood books of Tanakh, led by Josh Bossay, featuring L. Grover Fricks.

[Josh Bossay]

Hey, hey, hey. Here we are.

[L. Grover Fricks]

My own rap verse. That's how it starts.

[Marty Solomon]

We were debating ship metaphors and I was like, do I call her the first mate on this episode?

[L. Grover Fricks]

But I was like, that's be the bon or something.

[Marty Solomon]

Yeah, I don't know what that means. See, I'm already out of my depth.

[L. Grover Fricks]

Oh, but you made a sailing pun.

[Josh Bossay]

So back on board. Well, going into this series, I. I have a bit of a reputation for being a little too lengthy in my episodes.

[Marty Solomon]

You know what? We're not going to dwell on that, Josh. We're not going to dwell on that. But I do have a burning question.

[Josh Bossay]

Okay, sure.

[Marty Solomon]

This episode is titled Kohelet Gets out of Bed.

[Josh Bossay]

Yes.

[Marty Solomon]

And I didn't say a book of the Tanakh in my introduction. What in the world are we even talking about?

[Josh Bossay]

That's great. We are studying the book of Kohelet, which, if you speak Hebrew, you know what I'm talking about. But that is the. The Hebrew title of what is commonly known as the book of Ecclesiastes, which.

[Marty Solomon]

Is apparently an English transliteration of the Latin translation of the Greek translation of the Hebrew Kohelet. So we're. Or a few steps removed with Ecclesiastes.

[L. Grover Fricks]

We'll get there.

[Josh Bossay]

You know, when we. When we get into it, Ecclesiastes is actually not such a bad.

[L. Grover Fricks]

It's fine.

[Josh Bossay]

It's all right. Yeah, it's honestly fine. Out of all of them, you know, this is. This is. Yeah, it's fine.

[Marty Solomon]

Okay.

[Josh Bossay]

We are venturing into the abyss. Mysterious. Yeah. The. The deep, dark jungle of Kohelet. This is a book that historically, you know, often people have thought that this should not even belong in the canon.

[Marty Solomon]

Controversial.

[Josh Bossay]

Yes, yes, very much controversial. Historically speaking, and not without reason. There is a lot of stuff in this wisdom book. You know, when we look at other wisdom literature, you know, I think on the whole there's, you know, there's. There's, you know, the proverbs side of things where everything is kind of nice. And I don't say this in a derogatory way, but just kind of middle of the road, like, hey, here's some advice for your life. Just some. Some good ideas. But then, you know, we have. We have Job, we have Kohelet. These books kind of force us to. To look at some deeper questions that might challenge some of our assumptions about God and, and at times say things that can even be perceived as heretical on the surface.

[L. Grover Fricks]

The Mishnah records the Tanayim arguing about whether Kohelet defiled the hands, so not even shouldn't be Anton, but whether defiled people who picked up the scroll. So, yeah, there's some, there's some hate out there.

[Marty Solomon]

Some passages very, very familiar to us, though, I would say.

[L. Grover Fricks]

Sure, sure, yes.

[Josh Bossay]

And it has, yeah, some very, very iconic passages and some very well loved passages. And some of those might be taken completely out of context or may simply just not be well understood.

[L. Grover Fricks]

That couldn't be it. We always take things in context in larger Christianity. Josh, we're doing great.

[Josh Bossay]

This is, you know, I will say there for, for people reading this, you know, just in your Bible like it is. It is not an easy book to wrap your head around for a lot of reasons. And we'll get into this as we start actually reading the text of Coalette. Before we get into it, I want to just put in a couple, a couple warnings, a couple things for us to really keep at the front of our head. Because the reason why Qohelet is so controversial is, I think, for a couple of reasons. One, it doesn't really bear a resemblance to the, a lot of the biblical genres we're familiar with. It's almost closer to like a work of philosophy than anything else. That is not that normal for the Bible. It is usually not one guy saying, hey, I'm just going to think about this thing and write about it and talk about it. There's usually a narrative. There's also, you know, not a lot of theology being talked about, or at least not in the way that we're thinking of. There is not like praise of God. There is not like, oh, God is so great. There isn't that acknowledgment of what we might consider to be like, core biblical theology. And this is the one that I think will really trip us up if we're not careful. And that is that Kohele is remarkably individualistic.

[L. Grover Fricks]

Perfect for us Americans.

[Josh Bossay]

Exactly. Perfect for us to project onto.

[L. Grover Fricks]

Oh, yeah, sure.

[Josh Bossay]

And to oversimplify. So we have to understand a couple things. So first of all, this. This is a book of philosophy. But unlike what we might think about, you know, some of the ways that the Bible speaks very broadly and speaks to philosophical questions, this is philosophical in its mode. Like it is trying to reason through tough big questions. And unlike Western philosophy, that is primarily abstract in fact, a lot of times when we think of things that are abstract, you know, think of the most abstract thing possible, you immediately jump to philosophy, right? That's how philosophy is situated in our culture. And Qohelet's mode of philosophy is much more concrete and grounded. It is not abstract. It is very much based in the practical. And even the way that Qohelet lays out their rationale, their mode of reasoning comes from images. And we'll see too, like references to other biblical stories and things that this is not just like Greek philosophy where we have, you know, propositions laid out of. Well, we say this is true and we say this is true, therefore this must also be true. Like, it does not follow that clean cut pattern. So we have to understand that going into this. And I think that is behind why Kohelet can be so confusing sometimes, because it can lose us when we aren't being aware of how it is trying to direct our thoughts. One other point about that is that everything Qohelet says, it's not what Kohelet is like. Concluding a lot of times Kohelet will say, oh, so I went down this path and I realized this, but then I whipped around and looked at this other thing, and that was pointing this other direction. And if we're thinking like everything Kohelet is saying is just, this is what I believe is true and this is also true, then we're going to be like, you're all over the place, like, tell us what you actually think. And this is a very different kind of philosophy to what we're used to. Okay, so that's one point. The other point of warning, going back to the individualism that I was talking about earlier, is that we have to understand that in Kohelet's context, this is kind of a radical lens to take, right? Like, this is not a normal mode of thought. And so when we hear some of the. The that individualism come through to us, it can just be like, ah, yes, this is just how I normally see the world. And we have to kind of imagine what this means in a context that is communal. And we also have to understand that Kohelet as a person, as an author, just because they've found this more individualistic lens, this more radical way of looking at their own society, culture, moment, all that stuff, that doesn't mean that they don't have different cultural assumptions still, that they didn't grow up in a communal culture, and therefore they still think in a more eastern way, even though they've brought an individualist lens into that. And then finally, and this might be one of the hardest things to swallow, but I think if we can accept this up front, it will make things a lot easier to understand when we get to the more difficult areas of Qohelet, which is that, to use a very anachronistic term, Qohelet's philosophical lens is very humanistic. And by that I mean that Qohelet is reasoning not from the point of view of God is always right. Let's figure out what God wants and obey. Qohelet is looking at life on its own terms. Know, we have this. This repetition of the phrase under the sun that will come up quite a bit. And so Qhelet's kind of saying, all right, you know, if we set aside these revealed things, if we set aside what God has told us, like our actual experience of life, our actual human experience, what is it telling us? And one of the notable things that we'll see is that, you know, even though Qohelet does mention God a lot and also mentions, you know, the existence of Israel and Jerusalem, but there is no mention of partnership with God. There is not this assumption that we are God's bride or any of those images, even though we will see that Qohelet does reference other parts of the Tanakh. Like, Qohelet is not ignoring or destroying those, but Kohelet is, I think, intentionally taking on a perspective of, okay, let's set all of that stuff aside. What do we actually know? What is the. The grounded reality that we see all around us? And I don't think that that is like a worldview that Kohelet is going to try and push us to also adopt, but just that that is where Kohelet starting. Yes. Elle question.

[L. Grover Fricks]

So if I hear you right, and please correct me if I'm wrong, you're saying that the normal way that we encounter either narrative and Tanakh, which is like, oh, the story is being told and we can put. Pull our morals from it or whatever, or we're reading Paul and we hear Paul or Jesus, who or whoever, like in Colossians, say Jesus is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation, and doesn't even matter where he's going with that or what kind of argument he's building, we can take that out of its context and preach a perfectly good message on like, yeah, what does it mean that Jesus is the image of the invisible God. Amazing. But what I hear you saying is in Kohelet, it's like, we're walking along on this path with this philosopher and they're making a series of observations about the world around them. And those observations aren't necessarily the conclusion. So like, you're on a hike and you're like, the sun, it is setting, it is gone forever. The sun has disappeared. And then much later in the story, we'll be like, ah, the sun has returned. Aha. You know, but we can't just fall like there is no sun now and preach a whole thing on it and take it as it is because it's, it's a step and a longer hike. And we have to be willing to go on the whole hike to see where Kohelet is going.

[Josh Bossay]

Exactly. And if we go back to, you know, sessions or not session zero, we go back to episode zero of Bama and remember, like, how Eastern perspective engages with questions. It shouldn't surprise us that, like, when Kohelet settles on a point, on a big conclusion, they emphasize it's usually not to bring clarity and closure. It's usually there to summarize everything and formulate an even deeper, more difficult question for us to wrestle with.

[L. Grover Fricks]

Sure.

[Josh Bossay]

And so a lot of times the most emphatic moments of Qhelet's reasoning, those like kind of concluding sounding moments, are the points where Kohelet is not actually trying to end the conversation, but start a new conversation.

[L. Grover Fricks]

Right.

[Josh Bossay]

With something new. So that is going to be very important. Otherwise we're going to come away thinking like, oh, Kohelet thinks that, you know, God is mean and bad and the sun is gone. Pointless. Yeah, exactly. And the sun is gone. This is very funny because that, that image of the. The sun is going to come up almost immediately here.

[L. Grover Fricks]

And that's what you mean by humanistic, right? That it's from the perspective of the human who can't see the heliocentric universe grappling with boy, we can only see from our perspective. So what, what can we figure out?

[Josh Bossay]

Right. Yeah. And. And I think also, you know, there, like I said, there are. I found a shocking number of remazine. I did not realize that Kohelet was so intertextual before I started studying for this. But even if we take that out, I think like, you know, if you were a gentile around the time when Qohelet's writing this, you could probably engage with this text. It wouldn't be something that you're like, okay, well, I don't know your story and where you come from. I'm not a part of the Exodus. I don't have that same history. So I can't connect with this. The way that Qohelet lays out this. It's very based on the real material world around us. And we'll see that, you know, God is kind of an assumed player in that, you know, kind of cosmology that. That this worldview that Qohelet adopts, but it isn't as. As personalized. It doesn't rely on the assumptions that, you know, as people of faith that we would bring to these questions. And I think that ends up being part of what makes Kohelet such a powerful book.

[L. Grover Fricks]

Sure.

[Josh Bossay]

So, again, if you can. If you can assume that there's kind of this humanist, almost materialist lens that we're going in with, that isn't where we're going to end, that isn't the point of the book, but that is where everything is starting, and we have to kind of be willing to see it through that lens. So not so that that's where we put our faith down, but just so that we can understand what Kohele is saying.

[Marty Solomon]

Definitely seeing how this book was controversial, but I'm also seeing, like, why they ultimately put it in. And I'm thinking especially of, like, when they would have first written it down. Being in captivity, being in this other culture that is maybe wanting to engage things on a more individualist level, being more relatable in that way. Yeah, what a. What a perfect thing to use to reach that culture. If that's. I don't know what the dates are on this thing, but I could. I could see that.

[Josh Bossay]

Yes. Honestly, having studied it, this would not make sense to me if it was not post exilic. And in addition, like. Yeah, the. Everything you just said, Brit, is perfect, and I think fits into that. You know, like Paul at the Acropolis. Like, you know, this is a conversation that could be engaged with in a broader societal way than just within. You know, this isn't a book that is just for rabbis. Yeah. But anyway, without us just talking about the book, let's just. Let's let's get into it. Now that we've got all those warnings out of the way, let's just read the first three verses and get a little introduction on who the heck Koheleh is.

[Marty Solomon]

The words of the teacher, son of David King in Jerusalem. Meaningless. Meaningless, says the teacher. Utterly meaningless. Everything is meaningless. What do people gain from all their labors at which they toil under the sun?

[Josh Bossay]

Well, well, well, just like I said, you know, if we just take everything at face value, this Book doesn't give us a lot to go on, but we got some important information here. So first of all, we have this. This word that your translation set as teacher. Mine here has preacher. Other Bibles will have other interpretations, but that word there is the word kohelet. And before I say anything about it, Elle, what is the, like, basic idea behind this word kohelet in the Hebrew?

[L. Grover Fricks]

Well, we've talked about this before on our Forgotten Women series, which I'm sure, Brent, it will link in the show notes for us and tell us what number that is if somebody wants to go back and hear more.

[Marty Solomon]

3, 20, maybe the sages one.

[L. Grover Fricks]

Yes, yes, yes.

[Marty Solomon]

3, 20.

[L. Grover Fricks]

So the word kal means to gather, to collect. And so I believe in that episode we discussed that it's not so much when we think teach or preach, it's somebody proclaiming something. And we have all sorts of different words in Tanakh and Hebrew that talk about that role using different roots, which is very fun. But this one is like a collector of wisdom, is the idea, I believe, in the naming of the narrator with this particular verb. And then the reason it's in the Forgotten Women series is that we would expect it to be just the kahal or a different violation, perhaps. But there is this little et. There's this little tav, which, just like in French, if you're making something diminutive and feminine, you put the E, t, t, e on the end. Hebrew puts tav on the end of many roots that it is making feminine. And the author of Kohelet continues to refer to themselves with this feminine ending throughout. The major pushback that you will hear about people saying, well, couldn't possibly have been a feminine author is that there's some complaints, some criticisms, specifically lobs toward women, which we'll get to in time. I'll be back for that one. Yes, but speaking from a woman's perspective, I would call it a bit hasty to say that a. A woman can never hold possibly genuine negative perspectives on her own gender. But then secondly, to utilize ironically or satirically to name those undercurrents of. Of opposition that she encounters in her daily milieu and to say them out loud. Rhetorical tactic. And so we'll get to that in time. But that's the big pushback about why people say, oh, no, no, no, no, no. We don't know why there's this feminine ending, but of course it couldn't be female. And so I've heard you already flip between different gendered pronouns. I'll probably continue to use female pronouns while talking about Kohelet. But if you want to say absolutely not all books of the Bible were only written by men, I invite some curiosity into that, you know, knee jerk reaction. But at the end of the day, I'm going to sleep just fine. If, you know, our listeners are like, no, thank you, I'm good.

[Josh Bossay]

Yeah. And you bring up a lot of good points there. And I think one of the other big pushbacks just instinctually, if you're reading this is we also get the line, the son of David.

[L. Grover Fricks]

Oh, sure. So of course.

[Josh Bossay]

And who does that make us think of right off the bat?

[L. Grover Fricks]

Gotta be Shlomo. He didn't have any other sons. David.

[Josh Bossay]

Yeah, it's gotta be. Gotta be Solomon. Yeah, he was king in Jerusalem. He's the son of David.

[L. Grover Fricks]

Sure was.

[Josh Bossay]

And what is, what is Solomon known for?

[Marty Solomon]

Maybe this is getting in the weeds a little bit too much. But king in Jerusalem, is that referring to whoever the son is or is that referring to David?

[Josh Bossay]

So this is a great question, Brent.

[L. Grover Fricks]

It is a great question. There's lots of ways to parse that. But you are on the money, Josh. That, that's why people attribute, of course, this to Solomon. But Brent is also on the money. Depending on where you put those commas which are not in the text, there's no punctuation in the Hebrew and there's even fewer particles in the Hebrew. So it can really be, you could translate it. The Qohelet, the wisdom collector of the son of David, the king of Jerusalem. So this could be Shlomo's sage. And as I believe I talked about a little bit in episode possibly 320, there was a cultural established norm that that was a job that women could have. Sometimes in our primitivist biases were like, well, women weren't even literate, so how could this have been a woman? Well, that's not always case and there's lots of nuance in there. And wisdom priestesses and sages and scribes was a big phenomenon, especially to the north. And there's queens, queens who filled that role and all sorts of fun little goodies that all take us way off track.

[Marty Solomon]

Yes, well, I tried to take us off track, but apparently didn't succeed this time.

[Josh Bossay]

So, and this is something that, you know, looking at alters translation and some of the academia, there is not a strong consensus because this book does not make it easy to have a consensus on who the author is. There's even questions about like, oh, is this a framing device? Is Kohelet Is are they gathering the wisdom of someone else and putting it together, or are they the. And there are a lot of different ways to read it. So this is not a statement on, you know, the answer to that question, but there's a couple of things that I want to put forward that will be the lens that I'm using just to help give us fresh ears, which is that I think it would be very interesting to see Kohelet as a feminine voice, especially given the very countercultural elements that exist within this work. And I think it would bring those out more if we had a vision of a radical woman philosopher that is publishing some really kind of scandalous ideas that, as we'll see, have a lot of very deep things to say and actually end up anchoring our faith and founding it in much more deep ways that, than you were probably even expecting right now, dear listener, but on the surface, trigger a lot of. Of the feelings of the people in power and the established norms of, you know, who is speaking. So I. I also want to address the Solomon thing because I. I think that, you know, there's. There's some. A lot of things in this book that might lead us to conclude that, oh, this is Solomon, you know, looking back over his life and. And talking and. And I don't think that is inherently a. A wrong point of view, but there is a very, like, strong thread of almost satire, the kind of an ironic tone that is very willing to exaggerate things to make a point and to use strong images to provoke. And like I said before, you know, like, this kind of defies genre because in so many ways, this is philosophy, but in some of the ways that it's provocative, it almost feels like a prophetic voice, something kind of in between the two. And so because of that, I feel personally like the author here, Qohelet, is trying to put the idea of Solomon in our head and using that voice almost as a character to get us to think about what would the wisest person of all time think of life really, at the end of it? And we'll have in later chapters some very improbable scenarios that are probably not literally true, but are used as images to move Qohelet's argument forward and her reasoning forward. And so I am going to refer to Kohelet as a woman. I will probably mess up and use masculine pronouns a bunch just because that's what I was brought up with, and I've already done it a bunch when I talk to people about this, as I've been Studying and writing this. So please hear me. This is not. I'm not trying to make Kohelet, you know, woke or, you know, shove in some perspective.

[L. Grover Fricks]

I'll string you up and flay you like a fish.

[Josh Bossay]

Yeah, please, please don't come for me. This is merely, I think, a good way of getting deeper into this text to hear the, like, the radical elements. You know, like I said before, that this philosophical approach, this individualistic approach is genuinely radical. In his times, the people did not have a consensus. Rabbis, like El said earlier rabbis were like, will this make you unclean if you touch it? Like, that was how strong the feelings were. So to kind of make sure that we have a touchstone on just how big Kohelet is swinging in terms of the ideas that are being put out there, how radical they are. I want us to have a firm grasp of that experientially as we go through this, because experiential is how Qohelet is reasoning. So with that being said, let's dive into something that's also here in the text. We'll be doing a lot of Hebrew here, just a heads up, because Qohelet loves repetition. You may have even noticed that hearing verse two. And there is again, a lot of choices being made in the interpretation of this book that I want to dissect. Not because we're going to, you know, get this nitty gritty with every book, but just to get a sense of some of the images that Qohelet is going to repeat ad nauseam so that we understand really this image that Qohelet is trying to invoke so that we can understand more clearly. So right off the bat, in verse two, we have this repetition. Sometimes it is vanity of vanities or futility of futilities. Brent, what was the one your translation went with again?

[Marty Solomon]

Meaningless. Meaningless. Utterly meaningless.

[Josh Bossay]

Utterly meaningless. So in Hebrew, this word is hevel. Hevel. Which keen eared listeners might remember that this is an Al, a name that we get very early in Genesis. This is the same name that Cain's brother Abel Havel had. And now El, correct me if I'm wrong, but the way I've heard this word described is it's, it's basically it's a word for breath, but not just breath. It's like a breath so faint that like, you could really only tell it was there on like a cold day where you can see your breath. Like it is just the merest breath. It's so ephemeral, the most ephemeral Thing possible. Yeah.

[L. Grover Fricks]

It's like the mist. And I think the name of Cain's brother there is bringing in this immediate sense of, like, sinking feeling, because we all know what happens to have it.

[Josh Bossay]

He does not stick around long in the story.

[L. Grover Fricks]

He sure doesn't. Big bummer.

[Josh Bossay]

And so that's where we get this image of futility, of, like, it's as empty and meaningless and it's going nowhere. Just like Abel's line. Abel's line goes nowhere. He does not have children and he does not have a leg. All those things are cut off for him. This is probably the most repeated word in Kohelet, if I had to guess. And what's also interesting here is. And we kind of miss this when it's translated as meaningless, when it's translated as vanity, like vanity of vanities or futility of futilities. You get one element of the Hebrew, which is the use of singular and plural here. And what's interesting is if you add it up with the singular and the plural, a havel and a javelin. Havel being one and Havelim being two. Guess how many Havels we have. Guess how many. Emptiness, futile, mere breaths we have trace. No, no.

[L. Grover Fricks]

One plus two isn't three.

[Josh Bossay]

Well, but read verse two again. This is repeated.

[L. Grover Fricks]

Oh, oh, oh.

[Josh Bossay]

Okay, Have El havolim. And that is three, says Kohelet. And then Kohlet repeats it. We have another three, and then we get all is Havel. So what's three plus three plus one?

[L. Grover Fricks]

You're stretching me. No, just kidding. Seven.

[Josh Bossay]

I'm sorry. El's concussion. I'm bullying.

[L. Grover Fricks]

No, not at all. I'm being facetious. Seven. We've got seven. How could it be any other number when we're hanging out with Josh Bosse in the Bible, it's gotta be seven.

[Josh Bossay]

These sevens just keep popping up. And this is something the rabbis point out. This is not a Josh original. I'm cribbing this from them. But what an incredibly explosive way to begin your book. 7. This number is supposed to be perfection, completion, all of creation. And what is Coelha using this number to talk about?

[L. Grover Fricks]

Impermanence, Mere breath.

[Josh Bossay]

It's nothing. It's nothing. It's barely anything. All of creation. Haville. Ha. It's gone.

[L. Grover Fricks]

Poof.

[Josh Bossay]

That is. What a. What a crazy way to start your book. Right? Like just right off the bat saying everything is pointless. Every single thing God created. Like evoking creation imagery to talk about how utterly pointless and empty and ephemeral and just us. It's. It Barely even exists. It's. It's so empty.

[Marty Solomon]

Thank you all for coming here tonight, but you're all idiots for doing so.

[Josh Bossay]

Yes, and in fact, throughout this book, Cohalette will also, like, remark like, you know, a lot of words usually are pointless. And. And I can't help but feel every time we get to one of those verses that Kohelet's like, is writing this down even gonna matter? Am I adding to the problem? Is this is. This is even me writing this book pointless? So, yes, this is. This is the starting position of this book, man. It seems like life is just one big nothing. Now, we also have another verse that I included, and there's a word in here that is a word and a phrase that get repeated a lot. The phrase which, you know, if you're at all familiar with Ecclesiastes, you know, which phrase in here gets repeated, and that is under the sun. Under the sun gets repeated quite a lot in Qohelet. And I think that, again, kind of linguistically agrees with the perspective I laid out earlier of, like, this is a book that is kind of taking this very, very terrestrial perspective. Very like, hey, as far as what we can see under the sun, you know, God's up above in the. In the heavens and, you know, can see all, knows all. How great for God, for us little old human beings walking around under the sun. This is all I have in front of me to work off of, and that's what I'm doing. And I think that there is, like, a raw honesty there that, you know, it can freak us out if we go in expecting one thing, but if we. If we can understand that this is where Kohelet's coming from, it'll be a lot easier. And, you know, we can understand this feeling. Qohelet's not the first person to feel like life is kind of pointless. But there is also a question here. The statement in verse three is a question. And in Hebrew, the root of the question is right at the beginning. The phrase ma yitron. Ma, meaning what? Yitron is often translated as advantage or what benefit. But the root of yetrones, the word yeter, which means a remnant. This is used, you know, when talking. Again, a very exile kind of word, has a lot of that flavor. And so, you know, Qohelet's not just asking, like, is there anything good in life? Like, as we get deeper into this, Qohelet's not just saying, ah, everything sucks. Nothing's good, everything's bad. I'm done. This is saying like, is there anything left over? Is there anything additional? Like, to me, this feels very much like, if I was going to put this in modern terms, this is someone saying, like, isn't there supposed to be more to life? Isn't there just supposed to be more to it? And if we hear it in those terms, like, this is something I feel like it's much easier to connect with. And this question of, like, what's the remnant? What's the extra thing, thing that's supposed to be there that my soul is looking for? Like, there's not even a name for it. There's just this space of isn't there supposed to be something left over? Something a little bit more. And that question comes up throughout the book.

[L. Grover Fricks]

I love that. I love zooming in on Yet I think it's an interesting perhaps reflection of our society of translators that we've gone with profit, advantage and gain, which are all really related to production.

[Josh Bossay]

Yes.

[L. Grover Fricks]

Versus yet there. The image is like, you have a cup and you have the fullness of the cup. And then the. Yet there is the part, like, spilling out over the top. The like, extra what's. What else. So if all of this, if all of my seven is emptiness, is impermanence, is something that ultimately doesn't matter, is there anything more? So I would definitely side with you on the. Is there anything more to all of this?

[Josh Bossay]

Yeah, I love that image, too, that that image works even better with my reading of it than I thought. That, like, the little overlap, the little. Like when you fill a cup of pie and there's like that surface tension, bit above the rim.

[L. Grover Fricks]

Yeah, yeah. And it shows up for the first time in Yaakov story. And it's talking about when he's wrestling the angel and he's talking about, is there anything I can come away with from this wrestling with. So is there any blessing we can find?

[Josh Bossay]

Perfect. Oh, Elle, that's so. I'm so glad you found that, because this leads into my next question, which also is going to include a moment of grace for all those translators that put it into the production mindset. Because Qohelet also does talk a lot about work. Right. In fact, work and, you know, wealth and poverty and all those things come up quite, quite a bit. And I think this has to do with the fact that, again, Coelhad's talking from a very real human place like Coelhad is. There's almost kind of a blue collar level of Cohelot, strangely enough, given the trappings of royalty that have come in in this Very early stage. And that leads me to this other word that comes up a lot, and this one I really want your thoughts on. El. And that is the. The word amal, which is the word there for. For labor. What. What is the leftover bit we have in all the labor that we're doing, all the work. And the more I see how this word comes up in Kohele, like, there's a lot of words for work in Hebrew. We've talked about that with regards to Sabbath. Like, there's a specific word for labor not supposed to be done on the Sabbath, and it's different from all these others. And amal is not the normal one used in Torah. And the more I looked into it, it feels like that it has more to do with, like, struggle. And that was kind of the idea I latched onto. But what is your perspective on Amal El? Is there a better image associated with it or another concept that would be more correct? How do you.

[L. Grover Fricks]

I'm with you. It is unusual. And not. If I were just to squint at the ceiling. The Hebrew word that I would have picked. It's often translated trouble.

[Josh Bossay]

Y.

[L. Grover Fricks]

So, like the classic job line is, man is born to trouble as the sparks fly up. But in its most. In its oldest roots, if you look at different lexicons, they'll have, like, an element of irritation. So I don't usually like strongs, but he says to toil, to, I. E. Work severely and with irksomeness. And so you see that across Tanakh when it's talking about in Jonah, when God's like, you didn't even model this tree. Right? Weren't the one who. With irritation to toil and labor over this tree. Why are you so sad that it's gone now? So very specific.

[Josh Bossay]

Yes.

[L. Grover Fricks]

More than just, like, working hard. It's not about working hard. It's like, working hard to the point where you're like, really well said.

[Josh Bossay]

Yes, there is, like, the element of work that is there, but it's also this element of trouble and irritation and something that is very frustrating. And to me, struggle is the perfect word in English for that. And that's why I also love that the first use of yeter of the remnant idea comes from Jaco wrestling the angel like this. You know, a very kind of close concepts of wrestling and struggling. And I feel like it allows us to also take that idea and more easily translate it into what we might be looking for in terms of spiritual insight to. To kind of rehear this verse. What is. What is Left over for a person. And all the struggle that we're doing under the sun, what do we really have to show for it? What is left over? What is it? Is it. Because it seems like it's just nothing. And this is the fundamental question of Cola. We will come back to it again and again and again, and there are other elements, other ideas and themes that play throughout it. But this question comes up, and a lot of times Qohelet will simply like, interject this question and she'll say, ma Yitron, what's the Yitron? What's the leftover here? Does this actually give us anything more than just the, hey, you work, you get paid. Is there something more to this than just that? And that question comes in a lot. And so we have to remember, Yitzchron, we're talking about that spiritual like, or not even necessarily spiritual, but something above in excess of something more, something more substantial. That word Amal. Struggle. I'll just be calling it struggle. But that all being said, Qohelet then jumps into some very poetic language and we'll hear some of these images and the way that it moves, reasoning forward. So we're going to read from verse 4 to verse 11, which I'll also just, you know, say this on the front end. This is a Kaiser.

[L. Grover Fricks]

Spoilers.

[Josh Bossay]

Yeah, spoilers. Well, you know, we. With. With Kohelet, you know, it's a very. It's a very tightly wound book. Like some of the patterns in here, really. I mean, talk about struggle. It's given me a headache on many occasions. Be like, okay, wait, this is looping back in this conversation from earlier and is also saying something new, like, it's a lot. So this is a chiasm we're walking into. Brent Billings, will you. Will you read for us?

[Marty Solomon]

Generations come and generations go, but the earth remains forever. The sun rises and the sun sets and hurries back to where it rises. The wind blows to the south and turns to the north. Round and round it goes, ever returning on its course. All streams flow into the sea, yet the sea is never full. To the place the streams come from there they return again. All things are wearisome, more than one can say. The eye never has enough of seeing, nor the ear its fill of hearing. What has been will be again. What has been done will be done again. There is nothing new under the sun. Is there anything of which one can say? Look, this is something new. It was here already long ago. It was here before our time. No one remembers the former generations and even those yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow them. Okay, the thing that stuck out to me the most, the eye never has enough of seeing. There's nothing new under the sun. That's doom scrolling right there in Ecclesiastes.

[Josh Bossay]

Yes, absolutely. Truly, for Qohelet to speak of doom scrolling, there truly must be nothing new if Kohelet can speak to this. So the chiasm here is not the easiest to follow. Again, Qohela does not make things super easy for us. You will become familiar with this, dear listener, but there's a couple things that point us in this direction that all the images that Qohelet is reasoning through follow the same pattern. So if we look at the very beginning, which, as it translated for you, Brent, a generation goes and a generation comes. The earth remains forever. It's not generation. Yes, we've talked about this word before.

[Marty Solomon]

Yeah.

[Josh Bossay]

Yes. This is not the word for generation. That's a different word. This is the word for eon. Like a historical epic, like a huge chunk of time. So what this is saying is like, hey, you know, there are, at the time of writing this, there are ancient civilizations that there are no more records of that we don't remember. And then, you know, 10,000 years in the future, there will be people who won't even remember us. Like, that is what's being talked about. Not just one generation to the next. That would be one thing. This is talking about huge spans of time and the durability of the earth through all that. Like, the earth has seen so many civilizations come and go and rise and fall, and it is constant and we are like dust circulating on its surface. And if we go to the very end, we have the return to the idea of the. The remembrance not lasting. There is no remembrance of the earlier things. And that which is going to happen in the future, when that comes, they will be forgotten. Like you. There is an even widening of that image. There are people more ancient than us that we've forgotten, and there are people in the future and they'll be forgotten by an even more distant future. And so there is a repetition of that idea, that function of how, you know, these are kind of four different images of this emptiness, this hevel that Kohelet is pointing at. If we move in one chunk to the center, we have the sun rising and the sun setting and rushing back to where it's going to rise from again. Which, you know, is, you know, bad, bad science.

[L. Grover Fricks]

But if the Bible says it, I believe it, Josh. Flat earth. Flat earth.

[Josh Bossay]

But if we jump to the. The other side. There is this idea in verse 10 where it's like, oh, people are looking at something new. And he says, oh, it's already existed before. This idea of false newness, which, when we think about that in connection with the sunrise. Every time you see the sunrise, it looks like something is new. A new day is dawning. But in reality, the sun has done that millions of times before. This is not new. This has happened before. But when we see the sunrise, it can feel like, oh, look, something new. The sun has risen. Thank goodness. And you know, we use the idea of a sunrise as a. As an image of newness. Even though it is something that is the most common everyday thing of all time. It literally is what defines a day. And so this again is this image of, of circularity, of emptiness and fruitlessness in this false newness. Then if we step one more to the center, we have on the initial half, the wind. It goes this direction and that direction. It's swirling and moving. And there's this four times the word for circle, so veb is repeated. The number four is often used to kind of demarcate. You know, you have cardinal directions, the four corners of the earth, this like totality, every direction you go. And Qohelet is again using this literal image of a circle through the verbiage, the turning of the wind, to say like, you know, you could go any of the four directions. They all circle back on each other. Even the wind is eventually going to circle back around the seemingly chaotic, moving in all directions, everywhere, all the time. Even that is kind of bound, pounded in by this, this endless cycle. And on the other side of it we have verse nine. What has been is what will be. What was done is what will be done. There's nothing new. Just everything is circling back. It's. It's happened before, it'll spin around again. And when we get to the very center of the chiasm, and this is what really set me off on it, because this is. You mentioned this earlier. This is where we have the. The eye not being full of seeing, the ear not being full, full of hearing. And immediately on the other half the chiasm we have the sea not being full. That there is this flow. It seems like it's filling. It seems like things are going one direction. It can look like you're. You're taking in, you know, you're taking in content on your phone. You're listening to new teachings, but you can get to a point where like, well, I'm not Satisfied? I still want more. So how can it really be getting full? There's something that must be emptying it. Perhaps there is a fundamental emptiness, a fundamental ephemerality to everything. And all these. These are, you know, four distinct images that have these corresponding, you know, four statements that kind of carve out this idea of. Of hevel. Of the futility of it all that Kohelet is responding to. And they are also like four different, distinct and different arguments pointing at different aspects of futility that all the sensory experiences we have can feel like we're gaining something. But are we really gaining something? You know, you can think that you're doing something different, but are you just repeating a pattern? You see something that looks like it's something brand new, but then it turns out it's the same old stuff. And then you can think that, like, even the widest possible angle, that the. The whole society, the whole civilization we live in could be just a. A blip, a footnote in history that is then forgotten by some other future civilization. Like, that is how. How small we are when we really, really look at things. And this, again, this is where Kohelet starts creating these. This tension and laying out the problem by applying different images to kind of pull it apart and put that tension on us so that we are sensing, like, even the things that we might point at to Kohele, all these, like, you know, counters we might have. Koheleh is kind of undermining them both by, like, zooming in on our most personal individual experiences with what we see and what we hear every day to the widest experience of where our whole society and civilization is going to.

[L. Grover Fricks]

I think there is an additional element of the deadening repetition in that the verb that's used over and over is just halach. So the eras, the Aons are walking, the rivers are walking. Everybody's just walking in circles.

[Josh Bossay]

Yes.

[L. Grover Fricks]

They're any. Yitron.

[Josh Bossay]

Yes.

[L. Grover Fricks]

Is there any blessing we can get away from this. This midnight wrestling match with.

[Josh Bossay]

It might be. Alter. It might be someone else. But when in verse 5, when it talks about the sun going back to its place, the more poetic translation of that is that it breathlessly rushes back to, you know, to stage left to. To the east, where it has to rise again. And especially given the repetition in Kohelet of under the sun, like, the idea that even the sun is kind of like, I got to get back to my spot so I can be ready for, you know, my next shift tomorrow. Like, right. Even the sun is. Has this, like, this job it's got a clock in for. And just like not even us as humans, but creation itself being a part of this emptiness. Which again, goes right back to the seven hevels, the seven just ephemeral, empty, barely existing breaths. This, I feel like, is kind of just, you know, it isn't laying out a new idea. It's deepening the idea that Kohelet is already thrown out there. And I really just want us to appreciate, like, the level of thought and craftsmanship and nuance thoughts that is in these ideas. Again, this is all coming from concrete images that give us a sketch of the reasoning that Qohelet is using. This is where Qohelet's sense of heaven heavily. Everything being empty, just mere breath. What's interesting is right after this, we get a weird little reintroduction in verse 12. And Brent, why don't you just go ahead and read the rest of the chapter because, boy, oh boy, we've been. We've been taking a long time setting this up. Let's just burn through the rest of this 12 through 18. Let's go.

[Marty Solomon]

I, the Teacher, was king over Israel in Jerusalem. I applied my mind to study and to explore by wisdom all that is done under the heavens. What a heavy burden God has laid on mankind. I have seen all the things that are done under the sun. All of them are meaningless, a chasing after the wind. What is crooked cannot be straightened. What is lacking cannot be counted. I said to myself, look, I have increased in wisdom more than anyone who has ruled over Jerusalem before me. I have experienced much of wisdom and knowledge. Then I applied myself to the understanding of wisdom and also of madness and folly. But I learned that this too is a chasing after the wind. For with much wisdom comes much sorrow. The more knowledge, the more grief.

[Josh Bossay]

Well, aren't you all in for a cheery time? Probably, as reflected in how long this episode will be. What a struggle you're going to endure. Oh, my goodness.

[L. Grover Fricks]

This doesn't sound like madness.

[Josh Bossay]

Yes, which. Actually, that's going to be one of the words I want to dig in too, with you. L. But first I want to say, isn't it kind of weird that we have another introduction like we already heard, you know? Oh, this. These are the words of Kohelet, son of David, king in Jerusalem. However, we want to interpret that. And here we have this again. I, Kohelet, king over Israel in Jerusalem. This to me is again like. I like to read it as kind of like Qohelet taking on the voice of Solomon, inviting us to Hear this as like, oh, this is the. This is Solomon with all the wisdom at his disposal, all the resources, you know, we might say the pinnacle of Israel's history. And from that perspective, saying, yeah, this is all just kind of trashed. So. And taking that perspective while sitting in exile feels especially poignant to point back to the golden days and be like, I don't even know. If things were so plump and ripe with goodness, then.

[L. Grover Fricks]

Yes. And not to get too far ahead of ourselves, but the. That this book, this scroll, is full of Persian loan words.

[Josh Bossay]

Yes.

[L. Grover Fricks]

So if you want to be like, oh, clearly, it's obviously Solomon. Really? Did he know Persian? Because, you know, who knows Persian? People who live in Persia.

[Marty Solomon]

He probably had at least a couple dozen wives who spoke Persian.

[Josh Bossay]

Well, okay, Brent, you know, that's a good point. Moving on. But thank you for the context. Yes. Lots of Persian loan words. Doesn't sound like Solomon. And we'll see other things that. That kind of wouldn't make sense if it was literally Solomon. But again, that's not the point I'm trying to make. I've already said, you know, enough about who I'm going to paint the author as, and that's for us to be able to dig in. So let's just dig in. So we have this reiteration of the introduction. And I think that part of this is to kind of create another quasi chiasm where it's like, okay, we had this introduction and then this kind of statement of the central question, which, again, I think it's lovely that, you know, in our kind of. When we set out ideas, we start with our thesis. We start with, here's the conclusion and here's my. My proposition that I think is true, and here's all the reasons why I think it's true. And with Coilet here, we have the opposite. We start with the central question. Here's the thing we're going to be wrestling with the whole time, and here's all these dimensions. You can pull it apart to really get what I'm saying. And so I think this second half is kind of a. A loose, quasi chiasm. A kind of chiasm that. And this reintroduction, I think, kind of hints at that. Why are we being reintroduced? Well, maybe it's a hint that there's. That's kind of a bookmark in an abc, ABC kind of chiasm. And I think we'll understand this a bit more when we pull apart what Kohelet is actually saying here, because this is a place Where I feel like if we do not have the right, you know, we do not have fresh ears. The lullaby effect can be very pernicious in Kohelet because there is so much repetition. It is easy to miss when Kohelet is actually moving an argument forward. And sometimes it just feels like. I mean, like, if we gave a summary of this, I would not fault anyone from saying, yeah, Kohelet has a lot of wisdom and. But that's also bad and stinks, which is like, okay, then what's. Why are we spending, you know, all the. This. These verses, the last third of this chapter, just saying, and I'm very wise, and I got lots of wisdom, and I have so much wisdom, you wouldn't even believe it. Like, there's more going on here than that. And we're going to do a little light Hebrewing here.

[Marty Solomon]

Light Hebrew.

[Josh Bossay]

Well, the first thing I want to point out is there. There are some linguistic parallels. So when it starts by saying that, I set my mind to explain, explore wisdom and all this stuff, that word for mind, first of all, is the word heart in Hebrew. Because in Hebrew, they do not have this, like. Well, one part of our internal processing is thoughts and things that make sense, and the other stuff's all this crazy emotion. And that's what ladies deal with. And that's totally separate. Like, there it is just all the heart, the heartbeat, the consciousness, the part of us that is processing the world around us, having thoughts, making plans. All that happens in the heart. And what's interesting with this is that we see a parallel. In verse 13, it starts by saying that Qohelet gave her heart to explore wisdom, to seek it out. And in parallel, it says that God gave our hearts. An affliction is the literal word. The word is anan. Sometimes it's used to talk about punishment for iniquity, but it can also mean a task or even a kind of like work or labor. Again, words for work and labor come up a lot. But I like this idea of an affliction in that it's like, this is a. This is a condition that God has given to humanity, to what Sarah made Hagar do. Yes, yes, exactly. It is a. As my translation puts it, it is a sorry task which God has given humanity to be troubled with with. It is a trouble God has troubled us with. It is an affliction that we are afflicted, that we want to know and we want to explore and understand. And just as Qohelet has given her heart to this, God has kind of put that in everyone. So again, we kind of had this very, you know, humanistic, like, this is an everyman sort of thing. But it's also Qohelet. In this chapter, she's laying it out as her primary concern. I set my heart to seek and explore with wisdom everything that's done under heaven. So using wisdom to seek and explore everything that's done, then following that with, I have seen everything done, and it's all hevel. And then she adds an additional phrase, which, you know, probably even if you're not familiar with Kohelet Ecclesiastes you're familiar with, which is this idea of chasing the wind. But I don't like that image of chasing the wind. It's not the best because the root word for what's translated as chasing, there is not a word for like, pursuing or running after. It's a shepherding word. So the way Robert Alter translates it, which I very much like this idea of herding the wind, you know, and we. We have a phrase in English, you know, herding cats. Think about how much harder it is to herd wind as compared to cats. You know, like, this is again, a very, very radical image, a very extreme image, and I think kind of fills the other side of how we struggle with this question. On one hand, we might feel a little depressed and just say, oh, everything's empty. But then, you know, when you get up and try and do something about it and say, no, you know, maybe it's not empty. Maybe I can change things. And then you can't. And it feels like you're just trying to direct the air with your hands and trying to wave at it and say, go this way. And it just never goes the way you want. On that is also, I think, an important image, and it's going to come up a lot. So I will be translating that image as hurting the wind. And Kohelet is saying here that everything she's observed, everything that she's seen, again, these concrete metaphors are really important. She set her heart to do this, to just look at everything with wisdom. And then she looked around and everything she saw under the sun, futility chasing wind, people pointlessly trying to control life or this or that. And then we get this statement, which kind of sounds like a proverb, and Qohelet loves to do this. Qohelet will insert proverbs in the most beautifully maddening way, because a lot of times she will put two contradictory proverbs back to back or will seem to maybe invent her own proverbs. And they're usually meant to kind of. They're very dynamic. So the statement here is, what is crooked cannot be straightened, and what is lacking cannot be counted. Now, first of all, let's talk about that first thing. What is crooked cannot be straightened. I mean, is that really true?

[Marty Solomon]

I mean, are we talking about Darius's slinky, that torn, tangled up? Because. Yes, very true.

[Josh Bossay]

Yes. And we can say, like, even with our, you know, modern tools and things, you know, we can straighten things. But once something is bent, whether it's a slinky or something else like that, it's hard to get it exactly straight again, and it's hard to put it exactly right. But when we kind of think of it in terms of image. And the Hebrew alter points out that this idea of what is bent cannot be straightened is a reference to the spine, to the back. That once you are old, you cannot just go back and become young again and have a, you know, a perfectly working body. That there are some things that it is just too late to do anything about. What is crooked cannot be made straight.

[Marty Solomon]

Well, I don't like that message.

[L. Grover Fricks]

Neither does Jesus. So that's okay.

[Josh Bossay]

Yeah, there you go. Now it's the second part that I think is even more interesting. What is lacking cannot be counted. Which in a lot of circumstances, this is not the case. If I know I'm supposed. I'm on a field trip and I'm supposed to have 12 kids, I bring back, and I have 10 kids, I can count and say, oh, there's two missing. I can count what is lacking. So what is Qohelet really saying here? So let's think if we're. If Kohelet started by saying, well, you can't go backwards in time. If there's a problem in your past, you can't go back and fix it. No matter how much wisdom you have in your old age, you cannot actually fix what has already happened. If your leg was broken now, you. Or maybe you were in a wrestling match and you've got a limp now, you just got a limp. You can't do anything about it. In that context, let's think about this in terms of the past and our past mistakes. What was lacking cannot be counted. Now, see, when I think about this, when I think about mistakes in my past, a lot of times when I look at them now that I am older and wiser, a lot of times I say, oh, I wish I had just tried a little harder, or I wish I had applied myself more. Or maybe if I had Held back and not said this thing, things would have gone differently. And what Kohelet is saying here, I think, is. Is the opposite of that, that you. You can't actually calculate. What if you had tried harder in school? What if. Can you actually quantify what effect that would have had on your life? Maybe if you tried harder, you still would have had the same GPA and it wouldn't have mattered. Or maybe if you, you know, had done more homework, you would have, you know, aced everything. Maybe you're a straight A student, and if you had studied, maybe you wish, like, oh, I wish I hadn't spent as much time worrying about grades and I had, you know, had more fun with my friends. Okay, but maybe the image you're thinking of. Of like, well, if I had done that, then I would have more friends today. You don't know that. You don't know if the lack that you perceive in the past is actually meaningful. It can't be counted. It can't actually be accounted for. What was missing when we made those mistakes in our past? We can look back and learn, but that learning is really only going to affect our present and future. And when we get anchored in these mistakes of the past, we are looking at something that, like Ohella says, is. It's Havel. It's. It's empty. There is nothing to be gained by applying our knowledge in this way. Now we move on to the. The second half of this little chasm. I said to myself, look, I've gotten all this wisdom. I've increased in all my wisdom. Anyone before me in Jerusalem, they didn't know nothing compared to me. I, you know, we started with. I sought to explore all these things with wisdom. Now, look, I've got all this wisdom, and I have seen a wealth of wisdom and knowledge. I've seen other people who have knowledge and wisdom and seeing how they conducted themselves. And I decided to go further. Now, this is what's interesting. In. In this verse, verse 17, there is a shift where Qohelet, instead of just gathering wisdom and observing, all of a sudden the. The verb changes. Where Kohelet doesn't just want to gather wisdom like she has been doing, not even to apply wisdom like she was doing. Kohelet is now wanting to understand wisdom itself, to know wisdom and to know tuta, to experientially understand what is translated here, as, you know, as Brett said, insanity and folly or madness and folly. And of course, Coilet realizes too, this is also shepherding wind. But before we go there, L. I Want your opinion on this word translated as madness or insanity? Because when I looked into it, the root of this word is the same as the word for praise, for giving praise to God. Hallel. When we say hallelujah, what you're saying is give praise to God. And that word, hallel is the word used here for madness.

[L. Grover Fricks]

Madness for God every Sunday. Why not? No, the linguistic basis for going with madness comes from one place. And I believe it's the only time it's translated that way. And it's with King David. And he is seeking refuge. He's hiding out with the belish theme. And in order to disguise himself and his mental state, he's described as halalim. And so in our interpretive renderings, we go with madness. And there's some other descriptors of his behaviors that certainly can lend themselves in that direction. But it's also possible, again, in their different culture, pagan priestly culture. Right. That. That could really invoke somebody rambling and prattling on about the go.

[Josh Bossay]

Right, sure.

[L. Grover Fricks]

So if I wanted to be consistent, I would say that he was just rattling praise along with his other marks of madness and that that wouldn't have been very super unusual, perhaps in their culture. Yes. So I would try to stick with that praise idea to know wisdom and praise. And then the folly word there comes from Kessel. Insert Star wars joke here. Kessel wren.

[Josh Bossay]

Very foolish to try to do the Kessel run.

[L. Grover Fricks]

Very, very much so. But that word has to do with fatness, abundance. And certainly it's portrayed in a negative way in Proverbs. It's not just like, oh, and abundance. Praise and abundance. That's great. But it's almost as if she's saying, you know, wisdom and praise to so such extent that you become fat off of it. Right. With the pasturing word, oh, interesting. That shepherding wor word is really a pasture word. That's what makes it a shepherd word, is the word for pasture. So where are you going to pasture your sheep? Where are we going to eat? Where are we going to find enough nutrients that we can get chubby off of it?

[Josh Bossay]

Okay, see, this is interesting because I was the. What I did with this, and tell me if I'm off base here, but I kind of, you know, averaged out between, you know, praise and this idea of insanity. I was wondering if maybe the sense is more of, like, ecstasy, like an ecstatic state. Something in a sense, transcendent, but also something that is kind of beyond the purview of wisdom.

[L. Grover Fricks]

Sure. I mean, you could certainly go that direction, and it wouldn't be. It's divergent. But I wouldn't say that it's wrong. The thing that I would last, little nail I would put in my coffin. My argument is that she says it's pasturing after wind. And we hear wind and we think, oh, yes, of course, futility. But it's not wind, it's ruach. So she's trying to pasture spirit.

[Josh Bossay]

Yes.

[L. Grover Fricks]

Just yell that word in the mic. Sorry, Brent.

[Marty Solomon]

It's okay. Should be all right.

[Josh Bossay]

Well, you know, as. As. As Jesus says, the spirit, who knows where it comes from, who knows where it's going next. Tough job if you're trying to try to guide and shepherd that.

[L. Grover Fricks]

Absolutely.

[Josh Bossay]

And, you know, as. We'll see the way that foolishness is used throughout, like, Kohelet does talk about it as. Like, as the opposite of wisdom. But one of the things that Kohelet, you know, brings up in the future is, like, if. Is wisdom all that important? Like, is. Is foolishness any worse than wisdom? Really? Like, can we really say that? So there. I. I think that in, like, this is also exhibiting how willing cohel it is to question even some very bedrock assumptions of society. Like, oh, it's. And I mean, I. I would say for our culture, this would be like saying, hey, is being smart really, you know, the most important thing? Like, what do we really mean when we say smart? And, you know, for that matter, let's try and understand what we mean when we say stupid. Like, what are we. What are we really talking about when we label this thing is good and this thing is bad, and this thing is, oh, let's put those people at the top of the hierarchy and these people at the bottom. I think there's an element here of that. But I'll also say that, like, you know, this is a book that I will many times have to go out on a limb and say, I think this is what they're saying. I don't know. There's a lot of Hebrew here that even people who are more knowledgeable about Hebrew than l are. Like, who knows what this is about?

[L. Grover Fricks]

Who. Who are a legion, by the way, Just to remember.

[Josh Bossay]

Exactly. So, yeah, not only is, you know, so this is all big grain of salt. We. We are. I'm trying to sketch something out from. From what I am seeing, and it may not always be consistent. Again, the images and the transitions and the use of verbs and concrete images in Kohelet is very, very complex and nuanced. And I'm going to try and capture part of it. As we go through the book, we will not be spending this long dissecting it. This is to get us started and give us a common language for understanding some of these root ideas to finish us off right after setting up this kind of new element of saying, hey, you know, I've been. I've been paying attention to wisdom. I kind of. Wisdom is kind of my thing. I've been very watchful over, you know, in trying to. To gather wisdom and grow in wisdom. I've been very successful in that. That has become, like, something I'm very fruitful in. But now I want to understand the thing itself. I feel like, you know, there's something deeper here. And after saying all that, we get again, another kind of quasi proverb. In much wisdom, there is much sorrow or grief, and in increasing knowledge, there is increasing pain. And this, you know, kind of is. Is a little bit weird because it kind of sounds like. I mean, I guess there is some truth to that. But, you know, part of why we talk about, you know, wanting wisdom is so that we can avoid pain, we can avoid doing dumb things that wreck our life. But I think in light of what Kohelet said earlier about the past, this makes a lot more sense. The more I see other people in their wisdom do something, the more I realize, like, oh, shoot, that thing I did a couple years ago, that was probably so offensive to this person because I didn't realize that in their culture, this means this. And now I realize that I really looked like a huge dummy. Oh, my gosh, now I feel terrible about this thing I said or did. And I think that this is where, like, especially if you're looking back at your past and wishing you could change things, if you are locked into that, like, oh, I wish I could just go back and tell my younger self all these things that they would be more wise and all that, like, the more wisdom you get, that feeling just piles up and up and up. And that this project that Kohele is undertaking is something that will not necessarily be fun. It will reveal more mistakes that can't be fixed. And this is kind of like survivorship bias. I'm not sure if anyone is familiar with that. If you've ever seen the studio Ghibli movie the Wind Rises, they talk about that with designing. Designing airplanes. And anyway, the basic idea is that, you know, yes, wisdom will help you navigate life. It'll make you more successful. And the very fact that you will succeed and maybe get farther will mean that you will, by definition, have more things to regret because you've been introspective and thinking about what you're doing. And that will make you more aware of, of things that bring us pain. That awareness is not something that we can just take on. And this, I think, is very relevant for all our culture. This path inherently involves pain and suffering and coming to terms with, you know, if we're going to jump even into, you know, a full Jesus lens included way of taking this apart. Like in trying to follow Jesus, we are going to be convicted about a bunch of ways that we're not loving and that we're not kind and that we really need to work on ourselves. And that is difficult. And it's important to say starting out as we as Kohelet kind of lets us in on this journey that she's about to go on. And the one thing I want to say about this is that gathering everything we've talked about. One of the big themes of Kohelet, just another spoiler alert is time. And in particular, this chapter is very much focusing on the past, right? Like, oh, nothing is new. It's already been done. It's already. The past is already full of this stuff. There's this sense of things being forgotten. And then here we have, you know, in this second half, kind of the, the quasi chiasm, we have this layering of, of talking about how we wrestle with the past. And really when we think about how wisdom is built is from looking at the mistakes of the past and learning from them. That's the only way that you get more wisdom. And because of that, I think as we'll see, in contrast with next chapter, which is very focused on the future, everything here is about how do we relate to our own past, how do we relate to the mistakes that we have made that we cannot change even if we repent that. And to some extent that we can't even fully understand the mistakes of our past, we are always in some sense, trapped with that. And now this is not necessarily the whole picture. Again, Colette's going to take these ideas and go somewhere with them. But just since we have to stop here, what can we gain from this? There's this enormity of time behind us and we can see all the, the, the civilizations that have fallen, all the people who have, you know, thought that life was going to go one way, but it went another. When we've seen so many things fall apart, it is very easy for us to have our, our, our excitement, our verve, our. Our love of life to kind of be blunted into cynicism. And especially as you get older, it is easy for the experience of life to become something that is a chore, to become something that we even despair to have to go through, even when we do seek to escape that cycle through self improvement that can lead to even greater suffering as we kind of become more and more aware of. Like, oh, I'm a limited human being. I can't fully obtain my ideal. I can't even fix the mistakes I've already made, try as I might. So what do we do with that? That. And before I say anything more, I'd like to turn it over to, you know, my beloved co hosts here.

[L. Grover Fricks]

I think that some of the genius of what Kohelet is doing here is bringing the problem into the fore, right? It's hard for us to apply wisdom if we can't identify the problem. And so she kicks off with a bang immediately, like the nihilism that almost all of us experience. Another day clocking in, another day picking up the kid's Cheerios off the floor. Like, what is. There's gotta be more than this, right? And so she isn't afraid of letting us really sink our teeth into that. And I like what you're saying about self improvement. That that can become its own, like, false salvation, right? Like, oh, yeah, I just figure it out. If I just identify all my childhood traumas, if I just, you know, diagnose myself with whatever is trending at the moment, then I'll have the understanding I need to reach Eden once again. She's like, is it? Is it? Can we. Let's think about that.

[Josh Bossay]

Absolutely. Britt, what about you? You got any thoughts?

[Marty Solomon]

I mean, thinking about this increase of knowledge that brings grief and sorrow, I struggle a lot with trying to figure out, like, how connected should I be with everything that's going on in the world. And it strikes me as. I don't know. I don't know how to think of this one as there's nothing new under the sun, because I do think we've never known as much about the world as we do now. We're never as immediately connected to everything about the world as we are now. But at the same time, it is. This known problem of an increase in knowledge just brings sorrow. So it's not necessarily a new problem. It's. It's a new way of it presenting itself. But, yes, that's what's on my mind as I close out this chapter.

[Josh Bossay]

Man, you brought up a couple good things there. And one is actually a detail I skipped over in Verse nine, where it says nothing. The conclusion. So there is nothing new under the sun. It actually has another word in there that doesn't get translated, which is the word call or everything. So it says there is nothing that is entirely new. New under the sun would, I think, be a more literal way of reading it. So there is. This isn't saying literally nothing new. Oh, I've seen it before. Applying cars. Yeah. I, Kohelette, have already predicted that there will be like, no, there are actually new things. But the bigger picture is that there's. There's nothing that is just entirely fresh and new and separate from the problems of the past, whether that's on a personal level or a societal level.

[Marty Solomon]

Even without that qualification, though, I feel like in general, there's nothing new under the sun feels shockingly true. With very minimal effort to get things to line up, it's like, oh, yeah, people have been doing this kind of thing. They've been abusing power in this way. They've been whatever. Most of the time, even without that qualification, it still feels so true. But yes, I appreciate the extra word there that brings it home.

[Josh Bossay]

You asked this question earlier here. With all the knowledge at our fingertips, you know, do I need to be more plugged in and more aware of things? And we're certainly probably all aware of how knowing more about what's going on in the world can be very depressing, very grieving to our souls. What I find is interesting is that in the two halves between verse 12 and 18, there's the. The bracket with the first saying and the bracket with the second saying. In that second bracket, where Kohelet talks about this kind of new, kind of turning point, this new project she's embarking on, of not just gathering up wisdom, but actually thinking more deeply, trying to understand what wisdom is. What am I even doing? She talks about it slightly differently when she talks about just the piling up of knowledge. She calls that hurting wind. But she also says, it's heavy, it's futile, there's nothing there. But the second time she says it, when she says, I'm going to give my heart now to understanding experientially what is wisdom and what is folly? Like, what are we really talking about here? What is this ecstatic thing? Is there something more than this? It only says that it's hurting wind. It doesn't also say that it's hevel. And what I think is notable about this, and this is why all the details and nuance are important, hevel would imply that there's Nothing substantial. Substantial to it. It's not going anywhere. She doesn't say that. She doesn't say this is going nowhere. She simply says it is hurting wind. I can't control this process that I'm going on. And what's crucial to me about this is that she's not just trying to understand everything all at once. This is the specific thing that she has already given her heart to, that we talked about earlier in verse 12 or 13. So there are certain things that I think God has given all of us that just weigh heavy on our hearts that we care about. Like I care about the text. It is not like a burden for me to dig into it. I love doing it. I would do it if I wasn't paid to do it. Praise God, I am. And that is the issue being talked about here is that we're not being exhorted by Kohelet to try and look deeper into every aspect of our lives. That would be. Be, you know, that would be exhausting and futile and pointless, but in the. The heart of our purpose and the thing that we really feel called to do. I think what Colette is saying is if you, if you merely just become competent, productive, top of your field like that, in and of itself, that direction, it's not bad, but it doesn't lead to fulfillment. Rather, we have to at some point look at what we feel led to do, called to do, whatever language you want to put around that and understand, like, what is this really? What is it that I'm really called to do? Because it's. It's easy to just have our purpose, be something that we kind of pursue without thinking about it more deeply. And that's why I love that, that in this super nuanced way by saying, oh, this is hurting wind, without saying, it's empty, it's heavy. Kohelet is kind of saying like, I can't control this process, but it is, it isn't going to be fruitless. This is going somewhere for me to really understand this distinction, to experience it for myself. Not for me to just sit up in my palace, my golden Solomon throne, just pointing my scepter at things and saying, I understand this. Here's an answer for you. Here's an answer for you. It's not just scrolling on her phone and saying, oh, they. That's happened because they have the wrong politics. This is happening because y' all don't know Jesus. I have an answer for everyone else. Else. It is something that she is going to experience for herself to get deeper into In a. In a human way, not in an intellectual way, she's actually going to go out and experience this. And this is what I think actually kind of solves the problem that's being brought up, which is that no matter what you set your heart to do, there is going to be this. This obstacle you run into. Is, does this matter? Is this worth. Worth it? Is there anything. Is there a yet, Is there something above that this is reaching to. Is there anything transcendent in this? And we can never find something on the other side of that futility if we are just doing it out of obligation or out of habit, out of rote. Just. I do this because I do this. I'm a hammer, so I hit nails. That kind of approach to life is always going to end with this, this feeling of emptiness. But when we go deeper because we feel called to it, when we go, as God says to Abraham, go for your own sake. Go for yourself. Don't go just because you're following my orders. Partner with me because you really love me and what I'm about, and go with that heart, or don't go at all. Dive deeper because you actually feel called to look more deeply at this, or don't go into deeper. And when we approach things with that perspective, the problems of our past are. Are kind of made irrelevant because we're not trying to bury our head in the sand and just move on and become better next time. We are able to look more deeply and understand the whole. Understand the holistic thing at our center that. That is yearning for God, yearning for something maybe impossible, something bigger than what we see around us, this. This longing in our soul for something beyond just what we see around us under the sun. And that can't come from obligation. It has to come from us willingly giving our heart to the things that move us deeply. This, I think, is the insight we have already gained. Even though Kahelet, she's not done. She's got more to say, more brilliance, more literary genius, more incisive philosophy. But I think this insight as a way to cut through the burden of the past, of guilt and regret is at least for me and in my own experience, very freeing and liberating.

[L. Grover Fricks]

Amazing. Well, look forward to 11 chapters to come. What she has in store for us, what you have in store for us. Pulling up our learners caps, Getting into it.

[Marty Solomon]

All right, we have sufficiently introduced Kohelet. We understand what it means. We know where we are in the Bible. And that'll do it for this week. We've got a couple items for the Shownotes. You can find those@baymond discipleship.com or in your podcast app. If you want to get a hold of us, you can use the contact page if you want to find a group that is available on the website as well. If you want to support our work, of course you can do that. Everything we do is made possible by listeners like you who have joined us on this journey, who have joined us on the exploration of all of these topics. Some little understood, some better understood. But we all have something more to learn. So thank you for joining us on the Bama podcast this week. We'll talk to you again soon.

[Josh Bossay]

There.