Alicia Ostrikerfrom Ecclesiastes as Witness: A Personal Essay
Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable.--Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
One is obliged to bless for the evil as well as for the good.--Mishnah, Berachot 9.5
The most brilliantly pessimistic tract of all time, a dense mix of prose and poetry, the Biblical book of Ecclesiastes contains a treasury of quotations rivaling Shakespeare. Consider how many turns of phrase have their origin in the King James Version of it. "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity" is its opening salvo. "The sun also rises" gives a title to Hemingway, "remembrance of things past" gives one to Proust, and "the house of mirth" gives one to Edith Wharton. "There is nothing new under the sun," "The race is not to the swift," and "A living dog is better than a dead lion," are among its many pungent sentences. In Ecclesiastes we also find "cast thy bread upon the waters," "eat, drink and be merry," and "for everything there is a season." As a store of pure wisdom, the book is by common agreement unequaled.
But what is wisdom? Should reading this book make us feel depressed? Exhilarated? Agitated? Or serene? Does it ask us to believe that this life is the only one we should expect, or does it ask us to trust in an afterlife? Is the God who is invoked some three dozen times in the text in any way benevolent? Is he even real? Did one author write the skeptical bits I applauded, in the days of my youth, and another the pious bits which I elided from consciousness?
Commentary tosses up large disagreements. The text is pious and skeptical. It was composed by a single, or two, or plural authors, or it was a patchwork cobbled together by an editor.1 It is a dialogue with the self. It is an argument between despair and hope. It is essentially Epicurean, although "apikorus" later becomes the Hebrew word for heretic. It is essentially Stoic. Its genre, fictional autobiography, goes back to Akkadian literature. It represents the Sadducee position as opposed to the Pharisee.
Like a Buddhist, he recognizes that life is inseparable from suffering, and advocates detachment from desire, and the pleasures of "ordinary mind."
He is the first empiricist.
He is the first pragmatist.
He is the first existentialist.
Like Einstein, he likes to point out how little we know of the laws of the universe.
He is the first postmodernist writer.
I Three problems about this book particularly fascinate me. First, what we have of the author is not a proper name but a title. The book begins by calling itself "The words of Qoheleth, son of David, king in Jerusalem." This points obviously to David's son Solomon, and as The Song of Songs was traditionally held to be the creation of King Solomon's lusty youth and the Book of Proverbs that of his prudent maturity, so Ecclesiastes was believed to be the product of a bitter old age in which Solomon foresaw that his kingdom would come to ruin under his rash son Jereboam. Medieval scholars debated whether Solomon should be seen as the wisest of men seeking further wisdom, or as a monarch whose corruption cost his realm. But scholars today agree that none of the books attributed to Solomon could have been written by him and that Ecclesiastes is a work of wisdom literature influenced by Hellenistic culture, composed probably in the third century b.c.e., half a millennium after the monarch's lifetime. But the persona of "Qoheleth" remains a mystery. How, in the first place, should the name be translated?
The noun Qoheleth appears nowhere else in the Bible. It derives from a Hebrew term meaning "assembly" or "gathering," and so may mean "one who addresses an assembly." Ecclesiastes, the Greek translation which is the title used in all standard English translations including Jewish ones, is unsuitably Christian. Nothing about this text implies an institutional church, still less a priest. Qoheleth might mean one who collects sayings, or gathers wisdom, hence the King James usage "the Preacher." Some translations call him "the Teacher." Both terms misleadingly suggest a degree of consistency, objectivity and solidity of thought and emotion which the text fails to sustain.
Yet another suggestion is that the book should be called "The Testimony of Solomon," capturing the possible legal and religious connotations of assembly, but this seems excessively formal for the author's exclamatory and spiky style. Besides, "testimony" is a distinctly masculine term (a cognate is testicles; men covered their testicles with their right hand when taking an oath, before courts had testaments to swear on), while Qoheleth is a feminine noun in its form--for reasons no scholarship explains.2 But remembering how often the author speaks of seeing, and how his favorite phrases include "I saw under the sun" and "I said in my heart," I would like to call the author the Witness. I think here of Paul Celan's question "Who will bear witness for the witness?" and of what today we name, after the cascade of horrors in the twentieth century, the poetry of witness.
A second problem is the famous refrain. "Vanity of vanities" echoes through centuries of English literature and speech. Samuel Johnson's "The Vanity of Human Wishes" depends on the phrase, as does the opening of Robert Browning's "The Bishop Orders His Tomb," "Vanity, saith the Preacher, vanity"; the phrase gives us Tom Wolfe's novel The Bonfire of the Vanities, and is the understood missing part of a volume of poems by Robert Hass, entitled Human Wishes.
The excellence of the KJV "vanity" as key to the world-view of the Witness lies in the term's double meaning, signifying both vain self-conceit and meaningless void. But the Hebrew hevel is even more subtly layered, and carries even more pathos in its empty cup. Hevel may mean "vapor" or "mist," with a connotation of "breath," and so a suggestion simultaneously of that which is essential to life, and that which is utterly ephemeral. It may mean "wind." It may mean "emptiness" or "void," in a sense adjacent to Taoist or Buddhist concepts of emptiness. The rabbi Rami Shapiro describes his excitement when a college friend rushed into his room exclaiming that what was usually translated "vanity" really meant "emptiness."3 It is also the Hebrew for Abel, the name of the first murdered man in scripture, a man favored by God but unlucky, whose brother was not his keeper, the man whose whole life was mist.
Vanity is an abstraction, and the Hebrew hevel is not. Not quite, though close. As close as a breath. Something perhaps close to nothing, but not quite nothing. A reality, not an abstraction. A metaphor afloat at the edge of what is mentally graspable. To this word, this name, Qoheleth keeps returning. Often he pairs it with another phrase, equally ambiguous in meaning. "I have seen all the works that are done under the sun," he says; "all hevel and a striving after wind." Or, in other translations, pursuit of wind. Striving after wind means trying to catch the wind, as Thomas Wyatt puts it in a poem about failing to capture a desirable woman and finally quitting, "Since in a net I seek to hold the wind." The Hebrew r'ut literally means "tending" or "herding," from the root ra'ah "to shepherd," so the sense is something like the idea of herding cats. Frustrating, yes, but less tragic than comic. To add to the ambiguity, wind and spirit are the same word in Hebrew, just as spirit and breath are the same in Latin.4 Ruach. Spiritus. Trying to catch, capture, herd the wind? Or the spirit? And if so, what spirit? whose? In Genesis 1:2, ruach elohim hovers (or broods) on the face of the waters. Perhaps it is significant that ruach is a female noun, perhaps not. The phrase, or a variant of it, occurs again and again in the text, and it is often impossible to tell whether Qoheleth is talking about the failed efforts of others, or his own, or both. All human effort is an effort to control the wind, to control the spirit, the Witness says. This is less accusatory than "vanity," more poignant, more absurd. In the space created by these phrases we may find a door that, when passed through, opens straight into Camus's Existentialism.
Finally, what is God doing in Ecclesiastes? He resembles the God of the rest of the Old Testament very little. He is neither the God of my fathers, nor the God of battles. Israel concerns him not at all. Neither ritual nor law interest him. He is not the personal JHVH, the one who makes and keeps the Covenant, but Elohim, the remote-control universal One who in Genesis speaks the universe into existence and creates the earthling, Adam, as a pun on adamah, earth.5 The plural form of his name, which in other contexts simply means "the gods," tells us that he contains a stubborn residue of other and older religions in which he was either androgynous (which he becomes again in Kabala), or a divine couple, or perhaps an assembly of deities. Ontogeny recapitulates phylogony. The text seems to represent God the way Hellenistic philosophers do in the same period, as some combination of abstraction, personified force, and actual divine being. Yet moral questions hover around the edges of this representation like a swarm of almost-invisible mayflies.
Without attempting to solve the many riddles in Ecclesiastes, I want to look at the way these three issues of the persona of the writer, the recurrent reminder that all is mist, and the idea of God, play out in multiple potential ways in the text, and how they connect with what is not ambiguous in it: the repeated insistence that our ridiculous "I," our experience of life's vain windy-soulful mistiness, and the monster or puppetmaster we call God, together constitute an invitation to enjoy ourselves.
Notes
1. Luthor was the first to argue that Solomon was not the author. Grotius regarded E as an anthology of opinions of different sages. In the eighteenth century this view became a common one among scholars. Today almost everyone agrees that the title and epilogue(s) (12:9-14) are editorial additions, but otherwise no consensus exists. George Aaron Barton, Ecclesiastes: A Critical and Exegetical Commentary (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1908) surveys the possible editorial interpolations: the title given by an editor; the "says Ecclesiastes" of 1:2, 7:27 and 12:8; the interpolations of 12:9-13 which speak of E in the third person; passages declaring God's rewards and punishments--2:26, 3:17, 7:18b, 26b, 29, 8:2b, 3a, 5, 6a, 11-13, 11:9b, 12:1a, 13--which all interrupt or contradict the chief ideas, or both, and which he suggests are the work of an orthodox glosser, a pharisee; also the parables in 4:5, 5:3, 5:7a, 7:1a, 3:5, 3:6-9, 11, 12, 19; 8:1, 9:17-18, 10:1-3, 10:8-14a, 15, 18, 19. My approach parallels that of Michael V. Fox, A Time to Tear Down, A Time to Build Up: A Rereading of Ecclesiastes (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1999), which argues that the contradictions in E. are essential to his meaning, but my conclusions differ.
2. T.A. Perry, Dialogues with Kohelet: The Book of Ecclesiastes, Translation and Commentary (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), noting (p. 78) that Qoheleth takes masculine verbs except in 7:27, amrah quoheleth, suggests that if Harold Bloom can posit a female J, there is as good a reason to speak of a lady Qoheleth as of a king. I think this is intended Ironically.
3. Rami Shapiro, The Way of Solomon: A New Interpretation (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2000) 1-2.
4. The KJV gives "vexation of spirit."
5. Q is investigating the condition of generic "man," adam, which can imply (as in Gen. 1:26-27), male and female, as against ish, which is necessarily male; a woman reader can take some slight comfort in this.
Alicia Ostriker's most recent book is Dancing at the Devil's Party: Essays on Poetry, Politics, and the Erotic.
