Modern Age - Winter 2017 - 69

THE ANGELS OF ECCLESIASTES

C

onsider just one short passage, a selection from very early in
Genesis. After Adam and Eve have disobeyed God and have
been judged, God says, " 'The man has become like one of us,
knowing good and evil; what if he now reaches out and takes
fruit from the tree of life also, and eats it and lives forever?' " Using
this as explanation, God decides to drive Adam and Eve out of
the garden. Some modern readers (including Northrop Frye,
who ought to have known better) see fear in God's action here,
but others (like St. Augustine) are surely right in understanding
God to be speaking ironically at this point. Surely He is mocking
Satan's original temptation that humans "will be like gods" (and
the accompanying human belief in that statement), because the
duped, ashamed, blame-shifting, and weak creatures that stand
before God are the very last thing from being godlike.
Such irony of course depends on a reader being able to detect
the opposite intent from an apparent literal meaning. Like poetry,
irony depends on a reader's wit. Featuring untold comparable
instances, the Bible from the very beginning invites readers to
use imagination, to fill in the blanks, to find their own ways to the
author's unspoken or nonliteral meaning.
Nor can one object that there is no wonder elsewhere in Ecclesiastes. Besides the poetry in the texts that I have just discussed,
I've already pointed out the perplexing placement of the verses
about times and seasons. With that monumental passage on a
time for every purpose under heaven having been set alongside
the author's major, repeated theme of futility, sooner or later one
naturally wonders whether the author might believe that there is
a "time for fulfillment" and a "time for futility," too-as if, indeed,
futility itself might be perceived to have meaning, if one could
only see it from the highest mountaintop.
				moder nagejour nal .com 	

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Modern Age - Winter 2017

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Modern Age - Winter 2017 - Contents
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