Modern Age - Winter 2017 - 58

MODERN AGE

WINTER 2017

Like many a curious reader, I long looked for a positive overall
meaning in this book, a meaning such as one regularly finds in
other biblical texts. Yes, Joseph was sold into slavery by his brothers, but God (we eventually understand) let this event happen so
as to save the Israelites, even thereby to begin to shape the Jewish nation. In later books, the exile into Babylon occurred, but the
Jews eventually returned to the Promised Land wiser and more
faithful, even if the temple they rebuilt was by no means as great
as the one that had been destroyed.
Surely there was something deeper here in Ecclesiastes, too,
something I was not yet perceiving. But all attempts on my part
(or others) to ameliorate the apparent focus of the text seemed
to strike a false chord. A scholar whose gloss I remember said
something like this: "Statements of a traditional piety have been
added toward the end to relieve the gloom of the book, and
are in conflict with the rest of the text." Yes. The contention that
Ecclesiastes's author, in the main, is cynical about discerning any
larger, conclusive purpose to human events "under the sun" is
simply true. There's no way of getting around that.
Thinking a bit further about the latter scholar's opinion, though,
I realized that a comprehensive view of the text as involving only
gloom was not quite accurate. Those magnificent verses that
begin chapter 3, for example, the ones ironically often used in
burial services, bespeak considerable optimism about human
purposes and actions:
For everything its season, and for every activity under 			
heaven its time:
	
a time to be born and a time to die;
	 a time to plant and a time to uproot;
58 				moder nagejour nal .com



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Modern Age - Winter 2017

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Modern Age - Winter 2017

Contents
Modern Age - Winter 2017 - Cover1
Modern Age - Winter 2017 - Cover2
Modern Age - Winter 2017 - Contents
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Modern Age - Winter 2017 - Cover3
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