Well, the second lesson on Ecclesiastes is entitled The Evanities of Life, and we're looking at the first half of the book, which is chapters 1 through 6. The Evanities of Life, and the next lesson is called The Mysteries of Life, I really pulled this from the Catholic commentaries I recommend for you. I think that really sums that very nicely. So hopefully you have a chance to follow those commentaries as well as I curate some of the best quotes for you.
I have to go through this. But we're going to dive into chapter 1 verse 1, and it begins the words of the preacher, the son of David, the king of Jerusalem. Now really, really quickly, I don't want to spend a lot of time on this because I talked a lot about it in the first lesson introducing the book. But really quickly, who is this preacher?
Remember that preacher in Hebrew is Kohaleth? It comes from the word Kohale, which is assembly or congregation. So Kohaleth is the one who gathers the assembly, one who gathers the congregation, assembles the congregation. So therefore it's often translated as preacher.
And remember, there is one commentary that says it's Saint Jerome who started off that tradition as translating it as preacher, which comes to the R.C.V. So who is Kohaleth who is the preacher? Well, chapter 1 verse 1 says the son of David, the king of Jerusalem. Now, there's a lot of time in the last lesson talking about how there are so many different internal markers, internal evidence within the text saying that this person is Solomon.
Solomon is the assembler of the people. He's the one who gathers Israel to impart his words. And that's really important because the very first words of chapter 1 verse 1 is the words of the preacher. So he's giving his words of wisdom to all of Israel.
Now, just to go through this quick little series of proofs that this is definitely Solomon, at least the text identifying him as Solomon. Well, number one, we saw as the son of David, the king of Jerusalem. Later on, verse 12, it says he is the king over all Israel. So this is definitely Solomon.
That's point 1. Next, I should say that's point A. Point B, the preacher Kohaleth, it says later on in chapter 1 verse 16 and chapter 12 verse 9. The preacher Kohaleth was wise and taught knowledge through Proverbs.
Well, this seems to identify him or be very much reminiscent of Solomon. Point C, as we're going to read in more detail in chapter 2, Kohaleth, the preacher was a great builder of houses, planter of vineyards, owner of slaves. He had great possessions and wealth and had many singers and many concubines. Well, if you go back to 1 Kings, you're going to see that all of that is identified with Solomon.
So I'll get all that. And then point D, the fourth little point is that Solomon, as I explained in the last lesson in 1 Kings, chapter 8, Solomon literally assembled, gathered Israel. So he was literally the Kohaleth back in 1 Kings, chapter 8. He gathered the people for the consecration and dedication of the temple.
And he spoke to them and he blessed the people and encouraged them to be faithful to God and offered sacrifices and all this stuff with the great celebration of the temple. And the dedication of the temple and the context of tabernacles. So these are just very quickly four little points to review that clearly the text is identifying the preacher as Solomon. Now, I argued based on some good work and Catholic commentaries.
And with them, I take the middle ground approach, the balanced approach that based on sacred tradition, you've also got Jewish tradition and Christian tradition, both, has always said that Solomon was the author of this book. So I would say in a very balanced point, he is the author of the book, at least in substantial primary form, primary ways. He's not the sole author. Clearly, I think you could argue very convincingly.
He is the father of the work. He wrote the heart of the work. And later on, over the course of hundreds of years, we don't know exactly when the book took its final form, but probably after the ex-alpha sure, some people argue even at the Hellenistic age, which I'm not so sure about that. But in any case, for hundreds of years, we had other authors developing and editing it and forming it to the book that we have today.
So Solomon is the substantial author, but not the sole author. But he definitely, everyone certainly agrees, he is 100% the literary persona. He got whoever, if he wrote it and other people wrote it, they're depicting him and casting him as the great teacher and the great preacher here to impart his words of wisdom. And I think it's really important because remember, Solomon is a type of Jesus.
Jesus is the true Kaleleth. He is the true preacher. He is the true king of Israel. He is the true wise man who is teaching us, his people, Jews and Gentiles together, the importance of what really matters in life.
What is important in life? What should we be seeking for? We should be seeking for something that transcends this life because this life is we're going to see over and over again, we'll not satisfy us. Nothing in this life truly satisfies us.
We actually yearn for something greater. So the fact that Solomon is a substantial author, he's certainly the literary persona, but also the substantial author to this, that's important because Jesus is the new Solomon, I think. So looking at this in terms of tradition and the internal evidence, as well as typological spiritual readings, I think we're going to roll with Solomon here very, very comfortably. Alright, well that's enough about chapter 1 verse 1, I talked more about that last week or last lesson.
Alright, but it goes on here to talk about the most famous statement in the entire book. Chapter 1 verse 2, vanity of vanity says, Kaleth, the preacher, vanity of vanity is all is vanity. That is repeated so many times here, and everybody knows this line. Vanity of vanity is all is vanity.
Now, this line, vanity of vanity is superlative, right? Just as we say, like the holy of holies or the king of kings or something like that, right? This vanity of vanity is superlative. So everything in life is of the utmost vanity, right?
And there's nothing new under the sun. Everything is vain. Now, the statement vanity of vanity is repeated so many times, but it also begins and ends the book. That's what we call an inclusio, or book end verses, a framework, so to speak.
So the whole book begins in chapter 1 verse 2 with this line, and it ends the same way down in chapter 12 verse 8, at the very, very end, before the epilogue. And that's important here, because it's kind of like if you look at inclusio or book end verses or, you know, a sandwich, right? The two pieces of bread frame off the entire work here. Everything in the middle is framed by that line, which is crucial.
So everything that he's going to say and argue and observe and discuss in this book is set in the context of vanity. But what does that mean? Oh, one more thing here about that line, vanity here. Vanity of vanity is all is vanity.
Verse 3, we'll talk about in a second here. What does man gain by all the toilet, which he toils into the sun? We'll talk about that in just a second. This observation that all is vanity is all about everything under the sun, as verse 3 talks about in that line, under the sun, is repeated multiple times.
As I discussed in the introduction, here's a quick quote for you. Cohullis is sweeping pronouncement that all is vanity does not cover matters related to God and his activity as these have ultimate value. That's really important. He's talking about everything under the sun, not beyond the sun or above the sun or in the heavens.
He's talking about this earth, right? Here's another quick quote I put in your footnotes here from another great author, Estus. You can see all this in your syllabus and suggested reading. Cohullis develops his case by first limiting his range of evidence.
By reviewing life under the sun, he looks at only at created temporal existence and in particular human experience. He is by definition, leaving out of consideration God and what is eternal. So that's important. We cannot make the interpretation here, sadly some do, that he's an atheist or he's an agnostic and he's just simply promoting hedonism.
He's a nihilist, right? There's nothing after what we die. He's asking questions that the New Testament later will answer and have a lot of time later on to unpack that for you. But I really want to make it clear he's not denying God's existence.
He's not saying that God is vain. He's not saying that God is worthless or doesn't exist. He's just talking about our life, our very, very short life under the sun. Right?
That's a very important point to keep in mind here. All right. So the next question then is what is vanity? What exactly does that word mean?
Now the Hebrew word vanity is hevel. H-E-B-E-L. Sometimes you're going to see it H-E-V-E-L because B's and V's are labial sounds. Bea, bea, bea, bea, bea, bea, bea.
They come out of the front of your mouth, they're on your lips. It's actually kind of funny. I always reminded of this because my last name, Liebish, when I tell someone all my last names, Liebish, then I always have to spell it from L-E-B as in bravo, I-S-H. Because if I don't spell it for them, they often hear liebish, L-E-V as in victor, I-S-H.
And so I even still have bills coming to me, you know, utilities, bill with liebish rather than liebish. So anyways, it's just, you're going to see that sometimes in different commentaries. These and B's are interchangeable. But it's spelled H-E-B-E-L.
38 times this word hevel, vanity, shows up in the book. What does that mean? Well, of course it's not self-absorption, self-obsession, self-love, or an overly excessive attention to one's appearance. We often think that, oh my gosh, that, that dude is so vain.
Like he's in the gym, six hours a day, you know, slamming down protein drinks. He's just so concerned with his appearance, his muscles, his hair, you know, women are so concerned with their appearance. That's not the vanity that we're talking about here. This is a completely different understanding of the word.
Hebel in Hebrew means breath or vapor or mist or smoke. Kind of all of those variations, certainly breath and first and foremost. So breath and vapor and mist and smoke, that gives you the idea, it's a really, it's a really interesting word because just take the word smoke or mist. Or fog, you know, just stick with smoke.
Every now and then I like to smoke a pipe, right? I haven't smoked my pipe in a long time. They should start up again and ponder the mysteries of life. But smoke is interesting because if you ever with people and they're smoking a cigar or whatever they're smoking, if you look at the smoke, it seems to have substance, right?
I smoke my pipe and I see the smoke around me. It has substance. It has a color. It seems to have density of some kind, but you can never hold onto it, right?
Try to reach out and grab smoke or fog or mist. You're never going to do it. All right? I mean, unless you kind of blow into your hands, you cup your hands up and blow some smoke into it.
I mean, that's about the extent that you're going to have it. You can't really grab a fistful of smoke or mist or fog. It doesn't. It's just never, it's there, but it's not there, right?
It's substantial, but it's not substantial. That's the idea behind the word, hevel. So many translators will give other words like fleetingness or transience or femurality. And I really like the word everything's enigmatic.
It's mysterious. So hevel means breath, or smoke or mist, but in the sense that it's fleeting. It's unsubstantial or it's enigmatic. It's mysterious.
I like mysterious the best, I think enigmatic. All right, that's what we're talking about here. So everything in life is fleeting and enigmatic, right? It's like mist or smoke or breath.
You can't hold onto it and it really passes away quickly. You know, smoke will dissipate very, very quickly, right? That's the meaning behind Hevel here. And it's very, very fascinating.
It's there for a minute and then it disappears. You can try to grab onto it, but you really, really can't. All right, so that's what we're talking about. And then I already read verse three for you a moment ago.
So vanity, vanity, all is vanity. And verse three, what does man gain by all the toilet which he toils under the sun? This is kind of the thesis, chapter one versus two and three together, kind of form the thesis. What does man gain by all of his toil under the sun, meaning again, on this earth?
Well, the rhetorical question here, it's not even rhetorical. He's in arguments multiple times. The answer is nothing. We gain really nothing by all the toil that we labor underneath the sun.
And even this is really important. Like, this is what makes it vanity, right? So we toil and we labor out of the sun for X, Y, Z, thing, which he's going to examine step by step here in the coming chapters. And the result of all of this is really nothing, right?
It's just labor, something that's difficult. Now that word toil is very, very important here. And I think that more commentators, I mean, I don't really see this develop too much, not that I read every commentary, of course, but I think it's really important to spend some time on the word toil because it all goes back to Genesis chapter three. And the result of the fall, Adam and Eve's disobedience brought curses.
And if you go and read chapter three, verse, I'm gonna back up to verse 17. When God speaks to Adam, chapter three verse 17 of Genesis, note when toil comes up here. God says to Adam, because you've listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree, which I commanded you, you shall not eat of it, curses the ground because of you. In toil, you shall eat of it all the days of your life.
And then it just describes the difficulty and labor and toil some nature of work. Before the fall, Adam and Eve were commanded to work, right, till we keep the garden. But after the fall, everything is toil some. So now he's got to says, in toil, you shall eat of all the days of your life.
For the Lawrence and thistles, it shall bring forth for you. You shall eat the plants of the field and the sweat of your face, so shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you are taken, you are dust and dust, you shall return. That is, I think, the background for understanding Ecclesiastes. Because what Ecclesiastes is doing is understanding the nature of this curse.
That life is toil some, we work really, really hard and all we really get are thorns and thistles. And we sweat ourselves drenched and trying to get ahead. And in the end, we just go back to the ground. Dust, we are, and to dust, we shall return.
In fact, that's an expression that Ecclesiastes, the cohelf is going to come back to in a number of chapters here. I'll point it out when we get there. So I think it's really important to understand Genesis chapter 3 and the curse of the fall in the background of Ecclesiastes because really, cohelf is just going to develop this over and over and over again. And when you read this personally for yourself, note how many times the word toil or toils or labor comes up.
It's a lot. And note how many times he talks about death, how we're all going to die, the wise, the foolish, the rich, the poor, the famous person or the simple humble person who nobody knows, we're all going to die after a life of toil. So that, I think, is a really important interpretive key for this book. As he questions, really, what matters if all we have is toil.
Okay, so hopefully that's very helpful for you. It's been very, very helpful for me and my reflections on this book. Okay, so, and of course, I will point out I did put this in the notes, I pulled from a commentary. It varies people will also point out that Jesus' words in Matthew 16, 26, right?
What if you gain the whole world that loses your soul, right? You gain the whole world, but you can't take it with you and you lose your soul as a result. So, Jesus' words in Matthew 16 kind of ecclesiastes to a certain extent, like, gaining the whole world is really nothing. It's hevel.
It's fleetingness. It's enigmatic, right? And if you lose your soul as a result, because what really matters is saving our soul, gaining eternity and losing ourselves to this world. All right, so that, I think, is really, really important.
I hope you agree with that. Read Ecclesiastes in our next lesson as we go through it. Keep Genesis chapter three in the background and that will make a lot of sense. All right, so moving on then with verse four, what he's going to describe here in this prologue is just how the world just plods on.
The world goes on, generations come and they go, and everything happens under the sun, but you really can't quite make sense of it, right? It's all enigmatic as the world seems to be consistent and does its thing year after year, season after season. That'll be important for chapter three. Man's place is just kind of, well, seemingly meaningless.
Let's read this chapter one verse four. A generation goes and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever. Sun rises and the sun goes down, excuse me, and hastens to the place where it rises. The wind, also note the word wind.
That's going to come up a lot, right? Because everything is hevel and it's like chasing after the wind. All right, so the prologue is introducing this concept of the wind doing whatever it wants and we can't control it. So verse six, the wind blows to the south, it goes round to the north, round and round goes the wind and on its circuits, the wind returns.
All streams run to the sea, the sea is not full. To the place where the streams flow, there they flow again. All things are full of weariness and man cannot utter it. The eye is not satisfied with seeing nor the ear filled with hearing.
What has been is what will be and what has been done is what will be done. There is nothing new under the sun. Is there a thing of which it has said, see, this is new. It has already been already.
It has been already and ages before us. There is no remembrance of former things nor will there be any remembrance of later things yet to happen among those who come after. Oh man, that's pretty intense. This whole book is really intense, very philosophical, very real.
Again, I argue last lesson, it's not pessimistic. It's not negative. It's very realistic and it's a good philosophical inquiry as to what really matters. And so all right, so the world goes on and on and yet nothing is ever really satisfied.
The wind doesn't sing, the sun does its thing, the streams do their thing, but the eye is not satisfied with seeing and there's nothing new under the sun and all this kind of stuff. Really quickly, I'm going to spend a real brief moment. I wasn't intending to do this. I'll talk about it now.
When it says there's nothing new under the sun, what has been, will be again, you know, has been has already been done before and so on and so forth. Some people will be like, well, that doesn't make sense. I mean, look at technology, for example, look at AI, artificial intelligence. That's clearly new, right?
You didn't have the ancient years and cultures dealing with electricity and laptop computers and Siri and Alexa and all this kind of stuff. So clearly that's new. Well, here's what you have to understand. Some particulars may be new.
Sure, but tech has always been around. There's always been ongoing technological advances. All right. So yeah, you didn't have electricity back then or, you know, flushing toilet or whatever it might be, but you did have tech.
You did have increasingly new and new advancements, right? And technology, whatever it may be with metal or, you know, just even look at the pyramids, right? I'm pretty crazy. No one really knows how to adapt before.
That's actually his point. Like we always forget what happened before as he tried to reinvent the wheel. But in any case, yes, is there nothing new under the sun? AI, does that not an example technology that an example?
Well, it's just honestly to use these examples. It's just power of battle all over again, in my personal opinion, right? Technology is just the tower of battle, right? Where man tries to be God against God in opposition to God and to do our own thing, right?
We're trying to unify ourselves against God. That's what the tower of battle was. That's what a lot of tech advancements are today. We're doing all kinds of things, contrary to God's law, whether it's cloning or IVF or artificial intelligence.
I mean, that's the new brave world right there, trying to figure out the morality of artificial intelligence. But it's just the tower of battle all over again. And that indeed is nothing new under the sun. You know, the motivations that the motives behind these technological advances is just the same.
All right. And then try to commit the same sins as our great ancestors did in Israel or Babylon or Syria or Egypt or Rome or Greece or anything like that. All of the sins are the same. Humor nature is the same.
And either we go down the path of righteousness and obey God and love him and serve him or we don't. And whether it's the tower of battle or area today, there's nothing new under the sun. Anyway, just want to clarify that here really quickly because I think that is what it's getting at the point. All right.
So here's a little quote from Saint Basil, which I think tees us up really nicely for the rest of our discussion. So Saint Basil says the book of Ecclesiastes explains what exactly things are made of here in this prologue and shows and makes clear to us the vanity of many of the things of this world. So that we might come to understand. Here's this point that we might come to understand that the passing things of this life are not worth hungering for and that we should not devote our attention to useless things or fix our desires on any created thing.
That's a great quote and that goes to the title for this lesson, a life of detachment. We need to enjoy and I'm going to unpack all of this here in the next number of lessons and even in the next lesson, in addition to the next number of chapters, excuse me, we need to be detached. We can enjoy what comes to the best of our ability, understanding that all is heavy, understanding that we'll learn more for what this world offers us, be content with what we have, be grateful for what we have, bless God for it, thank God for it, and we need to set our minds on something greater than this earth. So that's why I've entitled this whole series of life of detachment because this is the point.
So again, Proverbs is a life of wisdom, which again corresponds to the first stage of the spiritual life, the purgative way. The second intermediate stage of the spiritual life is detachment. It's the illuminative way. It's realizing that life is heavy.
It's realizing that nothing satisfies on this earth. It's realizing that I can enjoy the simple pleasures of life. For example, right now, as I record this, our cat had kittens. We have a couple of barn cats from their mousin cats and one of them had kittens and it is the absolute most adorable thing in the world to see those kittens play and to cuddle up.
And to see my youngest daughter, who's only eight, cuddling up with the kittens, it is so beautiful. That is something that's a good thing in this life, whether they're kittens, know the roses, enjoy your cup of coffee, take a long walk, whatever we're going to see all this develop soon, but realize our hearts desire more. And then we'll see the song of Solomon next, which is A Life of the Vine Intimacy. What Ecclesiastes is asking about is to a certain extent answered in the third book of the trilogy.
All right, but I'm going on and on. Let me move on here then with the second part of our lesson, chapters 1, verse 12, and following which is a life of vanity or the vanities of this life. So Solomon very, very nicely has made his case. He said his thesis.
Everything is vain. Everything is hevel. Everything is fleeting, enigmatic. All right, we had gained nothing under the sun as we toil, right?
And I made the connections with Genesis chapter 3 about that. We live a life that is separated from God and crushed and stained by sin. And so what do we make of all of this? And that's what the next number of chapters are going to discuss.
So let's go on with chapter 1, verse 12.