JY: Welcome to GearTalk, a podcast on Biblical Theology. Today Tom and Jason begin looking at biblical writings connected to Solomon. He is a complicated figure, and this can make interpreting the things he has written challenging. How should we think about Solomon as an author? How should we think about the things he has written? How can we use these writings? After an introduction to Solomon as an author, we begin this consideration of Solomon’s writings with a look at Ecclesiastes.

JD: Good morning, Thomas.

TK: Hey Jason, good morning. This is, yeah, welcome to GearTalk. Here we are. We’re going to do something fun for the next few weeks. Don’t know exactly how long this will be. But Jason, I wanted to talk a little bit with you about Solomon and the things he wrote. How does that sound?

JD: I love it, Tom. Let’s go for that.

TK: He’s complicated. I used in my dissertation a word that designers call “equivocality.” It’s when something has the marks of kind of two competing natures, and it leaves people unsettled. Like—and the example I used was like maybe a piece of furniture, but the person who made the furniture didn’t sand part of it or didn’t finish part of it. But Solomon has that feeling for us. Like, we see parts of him and we say, ‘Wisest, wisest king who ever lived aside from Jesus,’ and these things. And we see these books he’s written. And then we also have his history. Are we supposed to feel that, Jason?

JD: It seems like we are, Tom, because the narrators of the Scriptures themselves raise lots of questions with respect to Solomon’s life. He’s—on the one hand, as you said—the wisest king, second only to Jesus, that ever lived. And then he is the builder of the temple and, therefore, the leader of Israel’s worship. And yet, we’re told that as he got older, he followed in the way that Deuteronomy 17 said kings should not go, and his many wives led him astray. It influenced the end of his life and resulted in the division of his kingdom. After his death, his son Rehoboam loses the northern ten tribes to Jeroboam I. And so, the author of Kings ends the account of Solomon’s life really not giving us any hope that anything changed. He—we’re simply told—incurred the anger of God, and God promises he’ll rip the kingdom in two during the days of Solomon’s son. And so, Solomon ends up sleeping with his fathers and is buried in the city of David. It does not give us any sense that anything changed in his life. But intriguingly, in the way that the Chronicler, writing 1 and 2 Chronicles, handles so many aspects of Judah’s existence, he doesn’t address Solomon’s sins—very much like he doesn’t address David’s sin with Bathsheba. The Chronicler is giving us a true perspective on this king as God wants us to remember him, but it doesn’t include the mess.

TK: So, I know where you’re going to go here, but just for help for us—the Chronicler knows about the sins, though he’s purposely not talking about them. That’s what you’d argue, correct?

JD: That’s right. There are many signals in the Book of Chronicles that the author is very aware of Samuel-Kings and the history as it’s portrayed there, but he’s writing now in a new time. Kings never mentions the return to Jerusalem, the rebuilding of the temple after Solomon’s temple was destroyed. It never mentions that, suggesting that the Samuel-Kings history was finalized during the exile, and it’s answering the question to those in Judah who are saying, “Why are we here? Why are we in exile?” And the narrator of the Samuel-Kings volumes is answering, “You are in exile because of your sin. God was being faithful to you, and you spurned him—you turned on him, you rejected the covenant that he had made with your fathers, and so you are here justly, as a just punishment for your sin.” In contrast, the Book of Chronicles is written after Israel has initially returned from exile. The perspective is Judah-focused. It addresses very few of the sins of the Northern Kingdom and very few of the sins of the Southern Kingdom. It’s focused very much on trying to help a people who are now asking, “Has God forgotten us? Has God forgotten all the promises that he had made about a future kingdom?” And Chronicles is given to answer the question, “No, he has not forgotten you. Indeed, he has remembered you.” And the very first word in the Book of Chronicles is “Adam.” And it’s written—it’s placed at the very end of Jesus’s Bible—not after Kings like it is in our English Bibles, but at the end of Jesus’s Bible. Chronicles is the last book of the Old Testament. And it really sets a trajectory of hope—looking back at the history, not portraying all the negative things, but trying to draw attention to the positive elements in order to give hope and focus on the promises that God made to David, the significance of the presence of God in Jerusalem, and calling the people to be serious about God’s presence and to be serious about trusting in those promises of the future kingdom that would be realized in the person of Jesus.

TK: So, we have then a chunk of books, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, and then actually two Psalms, Psalm 72, Psalm 127, that we would categorize as written by Solomon. When can you imagine him writing these? Because he has this complicated history. So, what would you say about that, Jason? Is this—like Ecclesiastes, is this a bitter man, confused? So, I could say that about Ecclesiastes, Proverbs, Song of Solomon. How do you place these in Solomon’s life? And I could include the Psalms, too.

JD: With respect to the Chronicler’s portrayal of Solomon never mentioning Solomon’s sins, the Book of Chronicles just allows Solomon to establish and build the temple, and then it says simply, “The rest of Solomon’s acts, from first to last, are they not written in the history of Nathan the Prophet, and in the prophecy of Ahijah the Shelanite, and in the vision of Ido the Seer, concerning Jeroboam the son of Nabat? Solomon reigned over Israel forty years, and Solomon slept with his fathers and was buried in the city of David.” It doesn’t mention any of the sins, and it suggests to me that the Chronicler—even though he’s very aware of all that Solomon did at the end of his life that was really foolish rather than wise, that was idolatrous rather than honoring to God—the fact that the Book of Chronicles allows Solomon to die as if still honoring God suggests to me that there was repentance at the end of his life. And that gives clarity to me as to why it is that this man could write a book like Ecclesiastes, at least as the main voice within the book, reflecting on the—as if an old man assembling a group of students and saying, “Let me share with you what I’ve learned through my life.” This gives me clarity on how someone like Solomon, who is no portrait of true love within a marriage, could draft a book like Song of Songs and help guide readers—even calling readers—“Don’t be like I was, but instead pursue authentic love, the kind modeled in the relationship I’m giving you in this book, that is unlike anything I myself ever tasted.” A book—the wisdom in Proverbs, I think, likely was growing up during Solomon’s entire tenure prior to his idolatry, urging his children, “Heed the words that I am giving you that I received from my own father.” It is quite fascinating to me that in a book like Proverbs, you have Proverbs chapter 4, which is setting the stage for this wise king, Solomon, to give instruction to his son on running away from Dame Folly, who is luring you in, seeking to make you lust after her and go in the ways that you should not go. And what Solomon says in Proverbs 4 is, “Son, I’m simply giving you—heed your father’s instruction. I am calling you to live in the way that I was instructed when I was a kid. When I was a son with my father, tender, the one in the sight of my mother, he taught me and said to me, ‘Let your heart hold fast my words, keep my commandments and live. Do not forsake wisdom, and she will keep you; love her, and she will guard you.’” These kinds of words are the words that David apparently gave to his son, but we have to remember where Solomon came from. Solomon’s mother was Bathsheba, whom David married out of an illicit, sinful relationship, where he—in his power position as king—forced this woman to have intercourse with him when she was married to another man. And yet that man was faithfully serving David out on the battlefield. And so David is not only an adulterer; his power position suggests he’s also someone who forced—who, we could call it, rape—who mishandled a woman made in God’s image who had been given to another person. And that’s Solomon’s mom. That’s Solomon’s dad. And Solomon heard from his father, “Don’t be like me. Pursue Lady Wisdom.” And Solomon is now passing that on to his son. And it really colors so much of the proverbial wisdom, and it informs books like Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes.

TK: So, then, would you say, if there was a final—like editing a book—and let’s just think of Ecclesiastes, you’re imagining that this might be pointing to some period of repentance at the end of his life, and him kind of gathering his thoughts together?

JD: The way that Ecclesiastes comes to us suggests to me that you have a wise king, and the narrator of the book—who may or may not be Solomon himself—tells us, “I am giving you the words of,” this is the ESV, the Preacher, very literally, it’s the Assembler, it’s the, it’s, I mean, we call it Ecclesiastes, from the Greek term, ecclesia, which is the term for the church. So it’s the gathered—it’s the gathering—this is the man who gathers together others to give them his wisdom. And what we’re told by the narrator, is that what I’m about to give you are the words of the Assembler, the Son of David, King of Jerusalem. And I have no reason to think this is not a true statement from the narrator about who the main voice in the Book of Ecclesiastes is. He is the Son of David, King of Jerusalem, and he’s one who could say that, “I made great works, I built houses and planted vineyards for myself, I made myself gardens and parks and planted in them all kinds of fruit trees, I made myself pools from which to water the forest of growing trees, I bought male and female servants and had servants who were born in my house, I had also great possessions of herds and flocks, more than any who had been before me in Jerusalem.” This is the story. I mean, he’s going to go on to say, I became great and surpassed all who were before me in Jerusalem. So if we’re talking about Solomon here—I mean, he’s unmatched by any other kings after him in Judah. And yet, there were many kings prior to him. All the Jebusite kings preceded him in Jerusalem. And then we reach all the way back to Melchizedek, king of Salem in Jerusalem. And then we have Saul, who didn’t reign in Jerusalem, but then David and then Solomon. So it seems to me likely, he’s looking backwards and just saying, “I even had a stronger, more expansive kingdom than even my father and any of the Jebusite kings that preceded me in this city. There’s never been a king who was able to enact, exercise my wisdom. Never been a king in Jerusalem like me. And yet, I pursued all these pleasures and recognized it took me nowhere.” So that’s the sense I get, is that yes, we have Solomon at the end of his life, is this king of Jerusalem, son of David, who—so this isn’t just a Solomonic persona—a fake Solomon—that the narrator is wanting us to just think about Solomon, and he’s writing as if it were him. No, to me, that seems to be counter to the claims of the text itself, that what we have here is actually Solomon himself at the end of his life, declaring who he is, and then offering his wisdom, and even urging people throughout the Book of Ecclesiastes, the male readership to delight in the life of their youth, and to pursue wisdom throughout their days.

TK: So, Jason, what I’d like to do is next week kind of dive into more of the contents of the book. I want to just say, or start or end our time here, though broadly thinking about Ecclesiastes, I would think a lot of us may be reading in our quiet times together, even talking—Ecclesiastes isn’t a book we frequently use. Pastors, those who are preaching, teaching, probably don’t frequently use Ecclesiastes. What would you say are some of the biggest questions people wrestle with when it comes to this book? Broadly speaking, that you’d say, “Yeah, we probably want to find an answer to that question if we’re going to preach it. We need to have a thought about it.” So what are some questions people wrestle with that you’d say, “Yep, we kind of need to nail that down?”

JD: Yeah, this is important. One of the biggest challenges comes in this word that is repeated. The Hebrew term is hevel, breath or breeze. It’s the sense of emptiness. What vapor? It’s like something that’s here, but you can’t grasp it. And how do we translate this term in forms how we’re thinking about the book from the very beginning? My ESV says, “Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity.” So vanity would be this sense of something that is vain, something that is misguided, misdirected, empty. Like it’s an empty pursuit. And so in this sense, the writer of Ecclesiastes would be telling us that everything in this world is empty to some level. And so many readers will say, well, it was empty until he met God. And then God all of a sudden takes what is empty and gives it form, gives it substance.

TK: Is that a problematic thought for a believer, would you say?

JD: Well, I think that’s a true thought, but I don’t think that’s the thought of the Preacher in Ecclesiastes, because he’s not declaring all is vanity unless you have God. He’s declaring—even in light of his conviction that God is on the throne, that God is the one in charge of all things, he is working everything, even the crooked things in this world—that the Preacher has a belief in God. And yet even in light of God’s presence, all is hevel, all is vapor. It’s not that God all of a sudden takes what is vain and gives it substance. No, even with the presence of God and the Preacher’s belief in God, he’s still able to declare, “This is still true.” And so, I just think that’s an unhelpful approach to how to think about Ecclesiastes because it actually doesn’t let the claims that the Preacher is making stand.

TK: Jason, I was just going to say I’m looking at two other translations, so you have vanity in the ESV. I think the King James would use that also. Is that correct?

JD: It does, and the reason that the King James does that is because it’s highly informed by the Latin Vulgate, translated by Jerome, and he uses the Latin term vanitas as his choice for this term, hevel. And so it was a very natural move from the Latin vanitas into the English vanity. But I think it gets us, it automatically puts us more in a negative type perspective for the reading of Ecclesiastes. Like, this sage has a pretty low view of the world, and then what we have to say is until he meets God. But the fact that he opens his book saying, “All is vanity,” and then we come to chapter 12 verse 8, and the Preacher declares again, “Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher, all is vanity.” I don’t think that we can…

TK: So nothing changed.

JD: Nothing changed. I don’t think we can faithfully say, “All is vanity unless you have God,” because he has God, I believe, and yet is declaring this is still being true. All is vanity. So you mentioned a second translation, Tom. The NIV simply says, “meaningless.” “Meaningless says the Teacher.”

TK: New Living does the same thing.

JD: Utterly meaningless. And immediately that raises—I mean, it’s a very negative view of the Preacher’s, the Assembler’s wisdom. He just looks at life as a narcissist, as someone that sees nothing positive at all. It’s not just empty, it is pointless. And there are many commentators that think this is exactly what he’s saying. And so they’ll even view Qoheleth as an inconsistent sage, who is sometimes talking right things about God, but then other times just absolutely confused or declaring nonsense. And this leads many people to actually think that whoever the narrator was of this book—who wrote the first verse in 1:1, “The words of the Preacher, the son of David, king of Jerusalem,” and then ended, framed all of the Preacher’s message, “Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher, all is vanity,” and then gives us an epilogue, gives us a conclusion to the book—and they think, well, the narrator, he is writing good things, but his perspective of the Preacher’s wisdom is that you shouldn’t really listen to it. You shouldn’t really pursue it. I’ll tell you what you need to do. You need to fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole of what man is called to do and to be. But that’s not what the Preacher was calling for, this perspective will say. And so, they see a tension. They end up viewing the words of the Preacher in Ecclesiastes as giving us misguided wisdom, 12 chapters of misguided wisdom. And before we jump and say, well, how could that be? That’s ridiculous. Think about the Book of Job, where we get all this dialogue between Job and his friends. And at the end of the book, God says to Job’s three friends, “You have spoken of me what is not true.” And so, you could have—the idea is that Ecclesiastes is actually more like the wisdom of Job’s three friends, and that only in the frame, narrator, do we get something akin to the wisdom of Job. And my challenge with this is severalfold. One, when I read the conclusion to the book, I don’t see statements that are in tension with what precedes, but are actually affirming what precedes. I think the ESV translation gets it right when it says, “Besides being wise, the Preacher taught people knowledge, weighing and studying and arranging.”

TK: It’s not cutting him down.

JD: It’s not cutting him down. It’s affirming. It says, “Even the Preacher sought to find words of delight, and uprightly, he wrote words of truth.” I think that’s a good rendering of the Hebrew. That it’s not only that he sought and failed, no. He sought to find words of delight, and he found them. And that we’re supposed to actually see what he was saying to be true and proper thinking about this world. And that leads me to say, I don’t think “meaningless” can actually be the rendering of this key word that’s repeated over and over again. Indeed, what would meaningless mean? All is meaningless. It means that even the words he’s saying are themselves meaningless. That—don’t listen to what I’m saying because everything I’m saying is meaningless.

TK: It’s nonsense.

JD: And that even thought—that very thought is self-contradictory.

TK: The Christian Standard Bible—NET does the same thing—the Christian Standard uses “futility,” and NET just says “futile.” But same—similar has a very negative bent to it.

JD: It does.

TK: We don’t use futility in a positive sense.

JD: Now, futile does capture, though, something that is central to the book, and that is the broken nature of reality. In the words of the Preacher, “life under the sun.” It’s where we all live in this world, this created world under the sun, in a world that’s been cursed. So, I actually can appreciate that language of futility because Paul, in Romans 8, actually uses the same term, the same term in the Greek translation when he’s talking about our present world. And he says this, creation was subjected to futility.

TK: Well, that’s helpful.

JD: Metanoias is the term that we are looking at here. It’s the term that’s rendering hevel, the Hebrew term. And so Paul, I think, may even have the Book of Ecclesiastes in mind when he says, “Creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it in hope.” So this word futility, we may actually want to change it—tweak it a little bit—but to recognize that everything in my world has this level of brokenness. Even me, even my mind, even, I mean it points to every human’s inability and neediness and frailty. And I think this begins to—futility does help us a little bit better than vanity or meaningless to actually understand this book. But I’m not certain that it still captures it perfectly. But one thing that—I don’t know how far you want to get into Ecclesiastes today, Tom—but your two questions, your question was this. What do we need to have answered in order to rightly understand the book of Ecclesiastes? And the two main elements that I think have to be answered is, is the conclusion to the book affirming or denouncing the wisdom that we just read for 12 chapters?

TK: That’s a major question because that totally changes how I read it, preach it, use it. It would be two opposite approaches.

JD: It would be. So does the conclusion affirm or denounce what proceeds? And then, how do we understand …

TK: Just backing up, conclusion being 12:8, would you say, through 14?

JD: So 12:8 provides the frame with chapter 1 verse 2. And so it provides a frame, but it’s written by the narrator, where it says, “says the Preacher”. That’s the narrator’s voice, talking about the main speaker in this book. And then verses 9–14 provide the actual conclusion to the book. So do the verses in 9–14 reject the wisdom that precedes and say, “he sought to speak wisely, but he failed.” And then it goes on, “The words of the wiser like goads, like nails firmly fixed, or the collected sayings.” The question is, are these goads—which are something a shepherd would use—is the focus only on how he, the shepherd, would strike and hurt the animals to get them back in line? Or is it actually talking about the beneficial side of the goad in keeping, in protecting, in leading? And then nails firmly fixed—nails pierce. That’s what wisdom is like, nails that are firmly fixed. But is the point to focus on the painfulness of this wisdom— namely that the Preacher, all he does is hurt us and misguide us. He strikes us. Or is it, no, he’s actually leading us, and he’s fixing us, like a nail firmly fixed, are the collected sayings. This is how scholars are wrestling. And one group views what proceeds as negative language of an ungodly wise man, and others would view it like I am proposing as the words of a realist living in a broken world, but who has been able to find beauty even in the brokenness in light of who God is. And so I’m seeing him as a realist and a godly sage who’s able to speak about our world rightly. But that means I’m not translating this term hevel, like vanity, or meaningless. I’m even not translating it as futile. What I’ll argue for is the translation enigma, mystery. And by that I mean something that we can’t fully grasp. It’s not something that is fleeting, or something that is empty. No, there’s substance. There is much meaning. But it is something that all things in this world, including God, are, from our perspective, something that we cannot fully get our hands around. Indeed, it’s like the repeated phrase, “the shepherding of wind.” The ESV has “the striving after wind.” But I think that shepherding wind is a more accurate rendering of what’s being given here. That for those in this world, trying to understand all of God’s providence is like trying to be the shepherd of wind. And we just can’t get our hands around it. We cannot fully grasp it. And so, there is this sense of futility, of frustration, living in the cursed world and part of the old age in Adam, the old creation. It’s a broken world. And yet, if we fear our God, we have hope. And even in the midst of our own ignorance, and in the midst of the frustrations of this life, in not being able to grasp all reality, what I’m going to propose is that this book is saying, we can still find joy. In a cursed world, we can rejoice. Because we fear God, and it’s those who fear God who have a future that is secure. This is the vision of the Preacher in Ecclesiastes, I believe. And therefore, the whole duty of man in a world that doesn’t make sense is indeed to fear God and keep God’s commandments living in light of the certainty of a coming judgment. And I think the conclusion of the book is going to completely affirm the body’s message, and hopefully, we’ll see that in days to come.

TK: So you would say that that phrase, “under the sun,” this world, but we’re supposed to have an idea here, under the sun, in this world which the events of Genesis 3 have dramatically changed, in this cursed world.

JD: In this cursed world. “Under the sun” is a signal for living in this cursed world, in this age. But there’s an added element, Tom, and this will become clear as we consider this book. And that is that in Ecclesiastes chapter two, we’re told right when it says that “there is more gain in wisdom than in folly, as there is more gain in light than in darkness.” Then the Preacher says this, “The wise person has eyes in his head, but the fool walks in darkness.” So when there’s this statement of living under the sun, it’s not just a physical sun that’s in focus. There is a metaphorical or figurative use of the sun in this book, such that only the wise men have eyes in their head. The fool walks in darkness. So though the fool is living in the same world as the wise—that is, in this cursed world under the sun—the sun is a sustained—though not always visible—expression of God’s goodness in this book, of God’s sovereignty in this book, of God’s oversight in this book. And only the wise have eyes to see the light of the sun. And as we’re going to see, that light—those glimpses of God’s grace—are what give fuel when the days of darkness are many and the sun cannot be seen in this world. It’s those days of light, those glimpses of grace that provide fuel for the wise person who has eyes in his head to remember that God is still in charge even in the days of darkness. And it gives him motivation to keep fearing God, and even provides him the opportunity that in the season of pain, that there can be sustained joy. A joy that is not bound by circumstance, a joy that is grounded in the glimpses of past grace, that give hope for future grace. That’s where I believe the Preacher is going, and what the narrator, at the end of the book, is affirming.

TK: I think that view for all of us, and we speaking—you and I speaking—everybody hearing, all of us have seasons where we’d say, wow, I’m living in that spot right now where it’s hard, it’s hard to see the sun in the analogy you’re using right here. And this book, as you’re presenting it, offering hope, people would say, I need to hear that. I want to hear the message of this book. So next week, Jason, can you kind of walk us, walk us through Ecclesiastes and how you would, how you would preach this in your church?

JD: I will, Tom. We will do—we will get some highlights that kind of help shape my understanding of how this particular book, that I believe comes from Solomon’s hand—at least the body of the book coming from Solomon toward the end of his life—most likely, the wisdom that this godly, saved, though real sinner, saved, made saint, recognizing his foolishness, having repented, and now calling saints who are walking through the same world that he’s walked, he’s calling them to not repeat his ungodly steps, but to fear God from start to finish, having hope for a future and living in light of the coming judgment. I will gladly walk through this book for our people.

TK: Love it. Love it. All right, well, blessings to y’all. Thank you for listening. I pray that this gives you anticipation for our next podcast and joy in maybe a section of Scripture that you have not found much joy in because it seems vanity.

JD: Sounds good, Tom.

TK: All right.

JY: Thank you for joining us for GearTalk. For resources related to Biblical Theology, visit handstotheplow.org or jasonderouchie.com.