All of Ecclesiastes Is Wisdom to Receive
Reflecting on How the End of the Book Endorses What Preceded It
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Interpreting the book of Ecclesiastes has challenges. Some of the claims in the book are uncomfortable to read. The tone throughout the book feels less like a warm hug and more like a splash of cold water to the face. The speaker’s words are quite grim at times, he claims that animals and people have the same destiny, and he makes comments about how stillborn children are better off than the living. The writer even seems preoccupied with the fact that we’re all going to die.
When you survey commentaries on the book of Ecclesiastes, you’ll notice that not every interpreter is convinced we should trust the words in this book. So how should we approach it? Is the content of Ecclesiastes like the book of Job, in which the speeches of Job’s friends have a mixture of truth and error? Or do the Preacher’s observations about life “under the sun” stay uncorrupted and trustworthy?
I think we can thoroughly trust the book’s content and wisdom, and I want to offer some considerations as to why.
If we pay attention to structural elements in the book, we will see that Ecclesiastes 1:1–11 form a prologue to the body of the book, which leads to an epilogue in 12:8–14. The opening and closing sections of the book are in the third person, and the body of the work unfolds in the first person.
There is much scholarly discussion about how the opening and closing sections relate to the body of the book. Are they from the same author or from different authors? I don’t think we can ultimately be sure if the frame of the book (1:1–11 and 12:8–14) was provided by an author different from the first-person “Preacher” (in 1:12–12:7). My inclination is that a second writer provided an introduction and conclusion to the wisdom material. Nevertheless, the resulting words in the book known as Ecclesiastes are inspired by the Holy Spirit, whether the Spirit worked through one human author or through more than one (2 Tim. 3:16).
In Ecclesiastes 12:8–14, the book is coming to an end, and in this epilogue we find a strong endorsement of the book’s content. In 12:9, the writer calls the Preacher “wise” and someone who “taught the people knowledge.” So the content between the prologue and epilogue came from a wise person who taught wisdom. This Preacher wasn’t rash or thoughtless with his words, either. Wise people know better than to talk like that. His practice was “weighing and studying and arranging many proverbs with great care” (12:9). The frame editor is telling us that the Preacher’s teachings—called “proverbs”—were the result of the Preacher’s prolonged reflection and careful construction.
Then the writer says, “The Preacher sought to find words of delight, and uprightly he wrote words of truth” (Eccl. 12:10). He is evaluating the Preacher’s words, which comprise 1:12–12:7 of the book. They are “words of truth” and not error. He thought about how to write the content, using “words of delight.” And he accomplished his task “uprightly.” The cumulative effect of 12:9–10 is that the writer of the epilogue is issuing a wholehearted endorsement of what we read in the body of Ecclesiastes. The book is biblical wisdom through and through, not a document riddled with errors that must be sifted out.
Having looked at the end of Ecclesiastes, now let’s look at the beginning. The Preacher is called “the son of David, king in Jerusalem” (Eccl. 1:1). This description is another reason we should receive the content of Ecclesiastes as biblical wisdom that should inform and direct our lives. We have seen similar openings to biblical books:
“The proverbs of Solomon, son of David, king of Israel” (Prov. 1:1)
“The Song of Songs, which is Solomon’s” (Song 1:1)
The first line in Ecclesiastes has “the son of David, king in Jerusalem” (Eccl. 1:1), which is closest to Proverbs 1:1. Since there is no author named at the opening of the book, Ecclesiastes is technically anonymous. But there is not a more likely author for the book’s wisdom than Solomon. And if the wisdom in Ecclesiastes is Solomonic, that fact bolsters even more our confidence in taking the content of the book as wisdom to embrace and apply.
In Ecclesiastes 1:12, the Preacher was king over Israel in Jerusalem, and this geographical situation would not have lasted beyond his son Rehoboam, because Rehoboam provoked a rebellion that divided the united kingdom in 930 BC. Solomon was the last king whose entire reign was over the whole land and based in the capital Jerusalem. Solomon certainly fits the “son of David” description in 1:1. And the vast wealth and flocks and concubines (2:4–8) fit with Solomon’s reign as well. The Preacher says he “surpassed all who were before me in Jerusalem. Also my wisdom remained with me” (2:9). Solomon’s greatness and wisdom surpassed those who preceded him. Furthermore, 5:1 refers to “the house of God,” which denotes the Jerusalem temple. The temple was built during Solomon’s reign.
The previous considerations support a Solomonic origin of the book’s wisdom. Even if a separate writer introduced and ended the book, we can reasonably attribute the wisdom of Ecclesiastes to King Solomon, the son of David who ruled from Jerusalem over all Israel. No wonder, then, that the epilogue positively evaluates and endorses the content of the book. The writer would be the nation’s shepherd-king, whose wisdom surpassed any who had ever lived. His writings can be trusted.