NOT ONLY WAS the Teacher wise, but also he imparted knowledge to the people. He pondered and searched out and set in order many proverbs. 10The Teacher searched to find just the right words, and what he wrote was upright and true. 11The words of the wise are like goads, their collected sayings like firmly embedded nails—given by one Shepherd. 12Be warned, my son, of anything in addition to them. Of making many books there is no end, and much study wearies the body.
13Now all has been heard;
here is the conclusion of the matter:
Fear God and keep his commandments,
for this is the whole duty of man.
14For God will bring every deed into judgment,
including every hidden thing,
whether it is good or evil.
Original Meaning
WITH THE CLOSING verses of Ecclesiastes 12 we once again hear the voice of the person who has been reporting the words of Qohelet to his “son” (v. 12) and to us but who has only occasionally and ambiguously indicated his presence throughout the book to this point (1:1–2; 7:27). Now he “adds” to the words of Qohelet his own more extended comments. The Hebrew word yoter at the beginning of verse 9 (cf. the same word in 2:15; 6:8, 11; 7:11, 16) seems to mean something like “conclusion, epilogue, footnote.” We may paraphrase verse 9a in the following way: “I want to add my own perspective on all this: I consider Qohelet a wise man and someone who taught knowledge to the people.” This is presumably the very reason why he has passed on Qohelet’s words at all. It is not likely that he would otherwise have done so.
Verse 9b further describes the author’s view of what Qohelet has been about. Qohelet has listened (Heb. ʾzn, although uniquely in the Piel, probably refers to “listening” rather than “pondering,” as in the NIV) to many proverbs. He has “searched them out” or examined them thoroughly (cf. Heb. ḥqr in verses like Job 29:16; Prov. 18:17, of the thorough examination of legal cases). He has “set them in order” (lit., “straightened them”; tqn, as in Eccl. 1:15; 7:13); that is, he has arrived at just the right interpretation (“got the meaning straight”), understanding what individual proverbs can and cannot mean in the context of traditional and empirically derived wisdom more generally.
The fact that human beings should accept what comes from the hand of God rather than striving with it and struggling against it (i.e., seeking to straighten what is crooked, 1:15; 7:13) does not mean that getting proverbs “straight” in terms of what they mean and do not mean is impossible. This Qohelet has achieved.
Qohelet’s task, then, has been to gather and reflect on proverbial wisdom, arriving at its proper interpretation. What he has to say, moreover, is not only “upright” (honest) and “true” (v. 10) but is also expressed in “just the right words,” which he has taken pains to find. The Hebrew here is dibre-ḥepeṣ (lit., “words of pleasure”), and the reference is probably at least partly to the high aesthetic quality of Qohelet’s writing, which we have noted throughout the book (e.g., in the frequent wordplays that are present). The aesthetics are not to be considered simply as dispensable ornamentation, however, but as intrinsic to the communication of what is true—form and content belong together. Qohelet’s words are at the same time “words of pleasure” (dibre-ḥepeṣ) and “words of truth” (dibre-ʾ emet, also v. 10).
As his “words,” moreover, set the individual proverbs in context and communicate wisdom and knowledge to the people, so too these words themselves have a broader context. They are only some of the many “words of the wise” (dibre-ḥakamim, v. 11), which serve a similar function to the “goads” (staffs with sharp nails embedded in them) that were used by drovers in the ancient world to keep animals on a straight path (akin in function, though not in form, to the spurs sometimes used by horse riders today). Wise words not only bring pleasure and truth, therefore, but they also bring pain, as they dispel illusions and confront folly, thereby preventing the receptive listener (however reluctant a listener may be) from straying from the straight and narrow path through life.
The wise themselves are represented in verse 11, indeed, as “masters of collections” (baʿ ale ʾ asuppot; NIV “collected sayings”),1 which has a double meaning. It is not only that they collect and interpret proverbs, as Qohelet did; they are also experts in shepherding the people, prodding them along like the “nails” embedded in goads (cf., e.g., Heb. ʾsp, “gather in,” of shepherding in Gen. 29:3; Mic. 2:12). They are undershepherds, in fact, to the one Shepherd, from whom ultimately comes everything that is beautiful and truthful, if painful—the Creator God, who gives sages to his people for their instruction and benefit.
If the transmitter of Qohelet’s sayings has allowed himself a brief commentary and summation (yoter, v. 9), this is not because he truly has anything himself to add (yoter, v. 12). He has simply been commending Qohelet’s words, not adding to them. Indeed, his exhortation is that his “son” should himself beware of making any addition in respect of the words of the wise.
The reason for this is given in verse 12b. The point is probably not, however, that the writing of books goes on endlessly (since it is redundant to say that the making of many books is endless), but that the creation of many books is pointless (it has no purpose or “end”). The “father” who thus advises his “son” wishes him to use the books that already exist, not as a foundation for his own literary activity, but as the foundation for living. Qohelet and his company have already thoroughly investigated the “many proverbs” (mešalim harbeh, v. 9). There is no profit in adding to their exhaustive work “many books” (separim harbeh, v. 12), nor indeed in engaging in “much study” (lahag harbeh) to that end, for such study only “wearies the body” to no good purpose.
The commendation of Qohelet and the warning to the son are thus two sides of the same coin: Wisdom is to be embraced and employed wisely rather than used for one’s own foolish ends. The “father” is at this point underlining some of Qohelet’s own teaching, in fact, for it is Qohelet who, while commending wisdom, warns the reader to use it well and not unwisely (cf. 1:12–18 and, esp. significant, 10:15, where “a fool’s work wearies him” employs Heb. ygʿ in verbal form, as here in 12:12 in noun form).
The commendation of Qohelet and the wise and the warning about a possible foolish response to their wisdom are now followed finally by the father’s perspective on the wise response (vv. 13–14). It is once again based, unsurprisingly, on Qohelet’s own teaching: “Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man [better, ‘this is everyone’s duty’; lit., ‘this is all people’]. For God will bring every deed into judgment, including every hidden thing, whether it is good or evil.”
Qohelet’s consistent advice throughout the book has been to live joyfully and reverently before God in the midst of what is often a complex world, believing that God himself will judge every human work (Heb. maʿ aśeh in v. 14; NIV “deed”). We remind ourselves here of passages like 2:24–26; 3:12–17, 22; 5:1–7, 18–20; 7:15–18; 8:11–13; 9:7–10; and 11:9–10. This is what the words of Qohelet and the wise are truly for, says the father to his son. They are not primarily designed for use in pursuing our own literary and intellectual ends. They are designed so that we may live well before God, reverencing him and bearing always in mind that the universe is a moral place in which there is accountability for the way in which we spend our days.
I cannot offer a better summary of the end of the book of Ecclesiastes, as it draws together the threads of what has gone before, than the one offered by Craig Bartholomew:
. . . central to the structure of Ecclesiastes is the juxtaposition of the carpe diem passages with the enigmatic passages and . . . this juxtaposition creates gaps which the reader has to fill. Chapter twelve of Ecclesiastes is fundamental to the book in the answer it gives as to how the gaps should be filled, namely by remembering one’s creator. . . .
Ecclesiastes is an ironical exposure of an empiricistic epistemology which seeks wisdom through personal experience and analysis without the “glasses” of the fear of God. This empiricistic epistemology keeps running up against the enigma of life when pursued from this direction, and it appears impossible to find a bridge between this enigma and the good that is visible and which the biblical tradition alerts one to. The resolution of this paradox is found in the fear of God (rejoicing and remembrance) which enables one to rejoice and apply oneself positively to life in the midst of all that one does not understand, including and especially death.2
Bridging Contexts
WE ONLY HAVE the Scriptures at all because people have passed them on to us—people like Qohelet’s epilogist, Jeremiah’s scribe Baruch (Jer. 36:4), or Isaiah’s disciples (Isa. 8:16)—and beyond these, the communities of faith who treasured them and lived by them. The mere possession of the Scriptures, however, will do us no good if we do not know how to read them or if we misappropriate them for purposes other than their intended purposes. It will do us no good if they are disabled in any way in respect of their role as goads that should keep the flock of God from straying off the path, or, in New Testament terms, as words “useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness” (2 Tim. 3:16). It is to the danger of “mere possession” that the author now turns as he brings his book to a close, addressing his “son” (but through him all of us, male and female, who read the book).
Knowledge of how to read the Bible is not something that humans beings innately possess. Acts 8:26–40 tells us of an Ethiopian official on a journey from Jerusalem to Gaza, who is reading from the book of Isaiah. “Do you understand what you are reading?” Philip asks him. “How can I,” he replies, “unless someone explains it to me?” He is reading the words, but he does not know what it all means, in relation to the other Scriptures and to his own existence. Earlier, Jesus had met with his disciples, whose Bible knowledge was presumably fairly good (Luke 24:13–49). Yet it was necessary for him to explain the Scriptures to them so that they could understand what the texts meant (24:25–27, 44–45).
The Bible is a vast ocean of literature that requires steady and patient exploration, under the guidance of both the Holy Spirit and other students, if we are to begin to comprehend how it all fits together and speaks to us with God’s voice—if we are to become those who “correctly handle the word of truth” (2 Tim. 2:15). An important part of the process is to know how to “set things in order,” as Qohelet did with his proverbs, for we only truly understand what one part of Scripture means when we set it in relation to another, which may be emphasizing rather different things. What can truly be made of a single proverb can only be seen if we set it rightly in the context of another, and God’s Word can only be heard as we engage in that process of ordering. Scripture must interpret Scripture, each part playing a role in forming our view of the whole. That is essentially what we have been doing in these Bridging Contexts sections—setting Ecclesiastes in the broad biblical context in order to hear what God might be saying to us.
Misreading the Scriptures is not, however, as serious an error as misappropriating them for purposes other than their intended purposes. The devil himself can misappropriate God’s words for his own ends, as we see all too clearly in the narrative of Jesus’ temptation in Matthew 4:1–11. There Satan quotes from Deuteronomy and Psalms in his attempt to lead Jesus astray, before openly revealing his real agenda (“All this I will give you . . . if you will bow down and worship me,” v. 9). Scripture is sometimes used in the cause of the idolatry of the self.
The teachers of the law and the Pharisees are often criticized by Jesus, likewise, for using the Scriptures in pursuit of their own agendas while completely missing the point of what they are saying (Matt. 21:33–44; John 5:36–47). Similar criticisms are found elsewhere in the New Testament, as in Peter’s comments on the apostle Paul in 2 Peter 3:16:
His letters contain some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other Scriptures, to their own destruction.
The author of Ecclesiastes is concerned about a particular form of the idolatry of the self that is often found among scholars. It occurs when the main purpose of the Holy Scriptures is perceived to be not to contextualize, relativize, and challenge the scholar as a frail creature of dust who exists and prospers by the grace of Almighty God but rather to provide the scholar with a platform on which to construct a writing career. The text becomes the raw material out of which he or she constructs beautiful idols.
It is all too easy, says the author, to use even wisdom completely foolishly in this way and to utterly, utterly miss the point. Wisdom must be allowed to do its painful work on our lives, as the goads bite; we must resist the temptation to reach for the painkiller, which is scholarly success, especially in publishing. The “ordering” of things is all well and good, so long as chaotic disruption to our lives is not thereby excluded—that is, so long as we do not arrange things in order to keep God’s Word at arm’s length, rather than with the intention of hearing it yet more clearly and obeying it.
Contemporary Significance
The “professor” is really the analogy to Don Quixote. Perhaps he will become an even more profound comic figure. Someone who has no idea or humanness in the direction of personally wanting to act and live in imitation of prototypes but who believes that it is a scholarly question. “The truth” is crucified as a thief, is scorned, spit upon before it cries out, dying: Follow me. But the “professor” does not understand a word of it; he conceives of it as a scholarly question.3
Much learning does not teach understanding.4
To know the Bible is not necessarily to know God, and to cite it is not necessarily to communicate God’s Word. The history of the misuse of the Bible in legitimizing human agendas and institutions that Christians should never have been found supporting is, in fact, a long one; American slavery in the nineteenth century and South African apartheid in the twentieth are only two of the more recent examples.
Much of the problem has its roots in a failure to “order” properly the whole redemptive history of which the Bible speaks, such that the church has sometimes come to think of its role as being the socially conservative one of legitimating and perpetuating the fallen state of things as described in Genesis 3, rather than the socially progressive one of being the light by means of which God at least partially transforms society and restores his kingdom as envisioned in Genesis 1–2. Thus, at different times Christians have opposed the introduction of anesthetics in childbirth (on the grounds that women are supposed to suffer during childbirth, 3:16) and equal-rights legislation for women (on the grounds that a husband should rule over a wife, 3:16).
Such interpreters have had no grasp of the larger movement of that Scripture that should guide us in the interpretation of its parts, and in particular they have failed to understand what it means that history, for the Christian, not only has a beginning and an end, but also a center in Christ, which casts light both backward and forward. Much learning does not necessarily teach understanding, nor does it necessarily prevent us from shutting the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces and traveling over land and sea to win a convert, only to make that one twice as much a child of hell as we are (see Matt. 23:14–15).
Of all the many misappropriations of the Bible that are possible, however, there can scarcely be one that is more grievous than that which the scholar commits when he or she takes the words of Holy Scripture and uses them for self-promotion and self-worship, multiplying these words endlessly in parody of the story of the loaves and the fishes (Matt. 14:15–21). If it is the mark of the fool, indeed, to overproduce everything—including words (Eccl. 5:1–7)—then we are living in exceedingly foolish times. Never have so many books and articles touching on biblical texts been written and published as in the past fifty years. Yet this explosion of literature has had little to do with genuinely new and worthwhile insights as to how God is addressing us through his Word. It has had much more to do with the fact that the Bible has proved itself useful to those whose business is “gain.”
Research and publication are necessary footholds on the ladder of academic success, and few can progress without them. They are also important for the institutions that employ the scholars, in their quest to climb higher up the ladder of success and to receive funding from the various bodies who are impressed by such things. So it is that we have had our literary explosion, yet little of what has been written is at all comparable in worth to the ancient classics, which were written in different times and by scholars with different motivations. The usefulness of much of our modern scholarship can easily be assessed, in fact, simply by asking of any particular piece of work: “So what?”
This has not deterred publishers from publishing it, even though it be of such an intellectual and moral quality that it would have been instantly returned to the author half a century ago. For publishers, too, make vast sums of money out of the Bible industry, and they are not anxious to ask too many questions of it. They are not likely to refuse to publish a book simply on the basis that we have too many books already and that another book is not necessary. Much more relevant as a consideration is whether a projected book will sell. Publishers constantly and actively canvas authors to write books, in fact, so that the overproduction will continue and the money will keep rolling in. It is a pity that one cannot say that Christian publishers generally dance to a different tune, but it is not visibly evident that they all do.
It is important to consider what Jesus would do—he who cleared the temple of those who had defiled it in pursuit of their own gains (Matt. 21:12–13)—if he were to come into the midst of this Bible industry and execute judgment on it. It is terrifying to imagine (and I speak now as a scholar myself) what he will do when each of us stands before him—when it is no longer enough to defend our own readings against all-comers, because it is only his reading that matters; when it is no longer enough only to have been interested in the artistry of the text and not in its truth; when our own books are judged not on their popularity among others who also cannot see that the emperor has no clothes, but only on their intrinsic worth when assessed in the light of God’s kingdom. As a friend of mine once said, “There is only one book review that really matters,” and that final book review is one that allows no objection or response. Much learning does not necessarily teach understanding, and it cannot absolve us from accountability before the truth.
All this brings us in the end to the question of what this commentary on Ecclesiastes is for. There is the distinct possibility that it was never necessary in the first place—that it is simply one more example of the unnecessary multiplication of words to which Qohelet’s “epilogist” refers. I think I have learned something about Ecclesiastes in writing it, however, and something more about God and the Christian life. I hope that the reader will also have learned something and will not simply be better informed as a result, but be a truer worshiper of the triune God.
It is certainly the case that my work can only be justified if it has indeed enabled the reader to hear Qohelet more clearly and through him to hear God more clearly. There is no other defense of the exercise. Nor is there any defense of the act of reading the commentary if it does not result in obedience to the Word of God as it is heard in the Scriptures. We will not be saved simply because we have read commentaries and taken notes. We will not even be saved because we have read the Bible or have preached brilliantly from its texts.
See to it, brothers, that none of you has a sinful, unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God. But encourage one another daily, as long as it is called Today, so that none of you may be hardened by sin’s deceitfulness. We have come to share in Christ if we hold firmly till the end the confidence we had at first. As has just been said:
“Today, if you hear his voice,
do not harden your hearts
as you did in the rebellion.” (Heb. 3:12–15)