Qoheleth: The Ironic Wink

6 Victorious Time

chapter 6 Victorious Time Aweary traveler, wandering alone in a dense forest, hears heavy footsteps in the distance and quickens his pace, fearing that a ferocious beast will devour him. As the frightening sounds come closer and closer, he runs frantically and falls headlong into he knows not what. Fortunately his luck has not run out yet, for his hands grasp a vine and he holds on for dear life. Under his dangling feet, he sees an abyss awaiting him. As he clings desperately to the vine, he watches two rats, one white and the other black, chewing away at it. To quench his growing thirst, he sips dew that has collected on the leaves of the vine. Before long, the rats chew through the vine; it snaps and sends the doomed traveler into the abyss. This allegory of time, going back to the early theologian Augustine and retold by Fyodor Dostoyevsky in The Brothers Karamazov, graphically depicts the human dilemma. We are sojourners in a dangerous land, and against our will we have been suspended over our final resting place while day and night eat away at our lifeline, the time we have been allotted on earth by genetic disposition, choice, and pure luck or lack of it. Still, even in dire straits, we manage to find moments of pleasure before plunging into utter darkness. The Temporal Expression “Under the Sun” Qoheleth’s consciousness of time’s ravages found expression again and again. He chose the great marker of time’s passage, the sun, to highlight his total message.1 For him the phrase “under the sun” and a variant, “under heaven,” characterized human existence: life takes place on earth beneath the bright reminder that the thread is quickly running out (compare Job 7:6). The words “under the sun” occur twentynine times, “under heaven” three times. In addition Qoheleth was not averse to using the simple word earth to designate the place of human activity (as in 5:1; 8:14; and 11:2). Others coined the expression “under the sun” long before Qoheleth. In the Gilgamesh Epic we read: “Only the gods [live] forever under the sun. As for mankind numbered are their days; whatever they achieve is but the wind.”2 The phrase “under the sun” is attested in a twelfth-century Elamite document and in Phoenician inscriptions from the sixth and fifth centuries b.c.e.3 Qoheleth’s use extends from 1:3 to 10:5, with only chapter 7 not represented in this block of material. The variant, “under Victorious Time | 71 heaven,” is restricted to the first three chapters. Both expressions are missing from the last two chapters of the book. In chapters eleven and twelve “on earth” appears in the only place where “under the sun” might have been used (11:2). A mere eighteen verses in this section derive from Qoheleth. In them, however, the sun is ever present as a source of pleasure and a marker of time, along with the dark of night. To them are added morning and evening (11:6), in reverse order from the frequent references to them in Genesis 1 (“And there was evening and there was morning, the first [second , third, fourth, fifth, sixth] day.”) Additionally Qoheleth mentioned youth and old age as notable periods in life. The phrase “under the sun” accurately indicates most human activity in a world before the invention of electric lights extended the hours of both work and play. With darkness came the cessation of work and the retreat into first caves, then tents, and later houses, all with dim lighting. In this world the transition from day to night was easily discernible. It was also an invitation to rest weary bodies from the day’s toil. Qoheleth’s near obsession with time is hardly surprising, for earlier sages made much of action at the right moment. So did he, but with one difference. Whereas they believed it possible to seize the right time to act, Qoheleth despaired of doing so, with one possible exception. In 10:17 he pronounced a land happy when kings are mature and princes eat at the proper time and show restraint. Even here, however, he gave utterance to an ideal, one that may not be attainable. In 8:5–6 he wrestled with the incongruity between the traditional belief that the wise know time and procedure (mishpat)4 and the fact that harm falls unexpectedly and is therefore beyond human control. He...