Ep. 362: Ecclesiastes: Biblical Existentialism? (Part One)

0:00 Mark: Foreign. You are listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who had one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 362 is something like is life meaningful? Or perhaps just what is wisdom? And we read the biblical book Ecclesiastes, written maybe around 250 BCE. More information about the text and the podcast please see partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer toiling for the wind in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:34 Seth: This is Seth Paskin winning the race without being swift in Austin, Texas.

0:39 Wes: This is Wes Alwan playing the under the sun drinking game in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:45 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey smelling some dead flies in the perfumer's ointment in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:50 Mark: And our special guest, this is Jesse

0:52 Jesse: Peterson making a test of pleasure in Portland, Oregon.

0:56 Mark: So we are doing this. This was long, long our list, but had fallen off of our list. But then, Jesse, you were in one of my classes in my Continental Philosophy class and mentioned your expertise in this area. Tell us about your book and your background here before we get into it.

1:12 Jesse: Sure. I'm an assistant professor of Biblical studies at George Fox University here near Portland, and I teach in the theology department, teach biblical studies there. And then also, by the way, we have a St. John's College style great Books program honors program at the school as well. And I teach half of my load is teaching in that. But yeah, as far as my writing, my first book is coming out hopefully now next month. It's been delayed a few times because of getting the Hebrew straight. But as far as the Hebrew font and the formatting, but that's called Qohelet and the Philosophy of Value with Cambridge University Press.

And then I'm actually working now also maybe for publication by next year on a standalone volume that would be a standalone translation of Ecclesiastes, part of a Princeton University Press series called Ancient Wisdom for modern readers. They do these little translations of old Greco Roman philosophy, stuff like that. And I convinced them to bring Ecclesiastes into the series. So that should be coming out hopefully next year. That would be called. All these books have how to titles like how to Die by Seneca or things like that. This would be how to have an existential crisis.

So that's in the works.

2:22 Wes: The book is really excellent. I want to just say that for listeners. You would learn a lot. I think they'll get a sense of that from this episode, but they would learn a lot about philosophy in general just by reading the book, despite the fact that it seems like, it's a very, very specific exegesis of a given text. You draw on a lot of interesting philosophical ideas and very clearly presented. So I can't recommend it highly enough to listeners.

2:49 Dylan: I would only underline it just reading through the second chapter or skimming it thoroughly. What I found was it's just your writing. You do a really good job of talking a philosophical introduction, like what Wes said of how to think about meaning and philosophical meaning in this case, but in a way that is. So let's call it accessible. It doesn't get drowned out in overly laborious explanation.

3:17 Jesse: So it's good. That was my aim. So thank you.

3:20 Mark: Can we say a few words? I do want to say more about the structure of your book and the themes and the authorship of the original text and what Koheleth means, but just why we're doing this. This is not a Bible study podcast, but I guess this book is often taken as a piece of philosophy. Of course, these were gathered way after the fact into the Bible. So even though biblical scholars. In fact, there are multiple podcasts about Ecclesiastes online, but they're for the most part reading it as Bible study, as so for instance, they identify, well, this is authored by King Solomon, which I'm arguing because we don't have a good alternative, then maybe our artist should actually just do a Solomon picture.

Because I kind of like the idea of, oh, we read Confucius, we read Lao Tzu. Probably not a real person either. Certainly the Confucian text is not written by Confucius. The fact that this authority. There are words that come in from later century, multiple centuries after the historical King Solomon would have been alive, even though he identified the character, identifies himself in a way that's unique as King Solomon. Anyway, I'm setting this up as this is the character, Right. The guy who supposedly then wrote the proverbs. Do you find that kind of stuff, Jesse, even useful as a scholar to talk about the mythology of how this is a character, the teacher Qoheleth, who is being identified by the playwright as Solomon.

4:42 Wes: Solomon during a major depression phase.

4:45 Mark: Yes. Near the end of his life.

4:46 Jesse: Yeah. I mean, even how you flesh this out is debatable a bit. But I would put it slightly differently that the writer, I think, is taking on a Solomonic Persona that he. Especially in the early chapter. It doesn't really last throughout the entire book. It's really just in the first couple chapters, but that he sort of wants people to think Solomon, perhaps because of the themes that he's getting at about wealth and wisdom and someone who maybe has it all, but is not getting meaning out of having it all. Tom Brady winning the super bowl and then questioning the meaning of life or something, that sort of scenario.

I think he wants people to think about that. And Solomon was famously associated with wisdom ever since the days of the historical Solomon. So it's sort of like bring this to mind. But I don't know that it was meant to be an actual like fake out, like wanting people to really believe that it was Solomon. Though either way it worked because a lot of people did think it was Solomon.

5:42 Mark: So instead you used this word Qoheleth, which is the literal meaning or the transliteration of the Hebrew, which just is from the first line. The words of the teacher, the son of David, King of Jerusalem, Vanity of vanities, says the teacher. And you say, well, this could also be rendered preacher. So that's the word koheleth. It's like that Lao Tzu, I guess just meant master, something like that. So it's a very generic.

6:07 Jesse: Yeah, it literally just means like gatherer or assembler. It comes from the Hebrew verb kahal, which means to collect or to assemble, usually people assembling together. So there's a lot of debate on exactly how the noun, what the noun, how it's functioning in relation to the verb. But something like one who gathers, one who assembles, presumably assembling people. And then teacher, preacher means is because. Oh, presumably assembling people to speak to them in some way at the assembly. But we don't know that for certain. But that's the standard way of rendering it.

6:36 Mark: So this seems like a necessary text to know because a lot of philosophers have referred to it that it's taken as maybe this is the first existentialist text. Can we kind of go around the horn here and say, give our initial reactions as to how relevant this seemed? Is this merely filling in a gap in your historical knowledge or how did you take this as a piece of philosophy we were doing in this series?

7:00 Seth: I think actually, Jesse, the way you frame the issue, obviously biblical texts, let's call it problematic of the book, I like, because these things are so open ended and normally I don't read Hebrew, but I have been in enough synagogues over my life to appreciate the ambiguity and the open endedness of Hebrew language. Biblical Hebrew anyway. So the idea that you are kind of positioning this as a philosophical text, identifying the fact that it seems overwhelmingly negative, almost nihilistic or pessimistic, depending on how you want to frame it.

And your attempt to kind of redeem that or at least provide an alternative way of interpreting it is really good. Because this, by the way, for anybody who doesn't know this is the where, you know, for everything there is a season, right turn comes. And the race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong. There's a lot of, like, memes, I guess you could say in Proverbs. Proverbs. But this is the same. These guys will know from the Iliad that Achilles at one point says, a man dies the same whether he's done much or nothing, when he's worrying about.

I think this is post patroclus, death. Right. So it's clear that. And if you think, I mean, obviously that was somewhat earlier, but this is still a live issue for Greek civilization as it was for the Hebrew civilization. So the question is, right, like, why toil? Why work so hard? Why try to build something when ultimately everybody dies the same and the just get punished and the unjust. And I think your attempt to kind of redeem a positive response out of this was really interesting and fun, even

8:54 Jesse: though that was not the main part that you guys read.

8:56 Wes: But, yes, the positive part. Right, Right. I think we mostly read in the negative or read or skimmed in the negative. But I think, yeah, this is an opportunity to think about the meaning of life and absurdity and questions like, can we be harmed after death? So this is a debate I didn't, you know, I may have seen a little bit of. But I hadn't really thought about this philosophical debate about whether one can be harmed by death. Right. The Epicurean position is that you cannot. The dead know nothing. We can't be harmed if we're no longer conscious.

And so as you summarize it, there's a deprivation account. But above and beyond that, the concern in this text seems to have to do with what you call death after death or metaphorical mortality, or ultimately it has to do with recognition, which is, you know, I had, in the thinking I've done about the meaning of life, I thought, well, this ultimately does seem to have something to do with recognition or prestige, but hadn't given a great deal of thought to it. And I think this, that's what you do in your book. And Ecclesiastes is a great vehicle for doing that.

10:08 Dylan: So I had not read Ecclesiastes before, although when I got to that section with the turn, turn, turn, I was like, oh, okay, now I remember this part.

10:18 Wes: You hear the music and you can't

10:19 Dylan: hear the Music you can't help but hear if you're born.

10:22 Wes: When we were.

10:23 Dylan: So I had read it and so I Reading through it, this was an example of, for me, reading something challenging that you can get a lot out of for the first time. You should never do that. Because I read it and I was like, I'm sorry, but what are you even talking about? And I found it in this way worse than Parmenides, which. Parmenides is similarly poetic. And you have to do a lot of work in order to mine out stuff from it. And I also find myself in such situations just thinking about how much of that getting it out of it is, how much of that is what we have to put into it. That isn't how much of it's really there in it versus that exegesis. Part of what's in it or part of what we're adding to it. That said, so I found reading your incredibly sort of helpful framing and indispensable. I think that it's. Now, that might be just because I'm unsophisticated, but I.

11:33 Wes: Well, you're more of an optimist by nature. I think I can see why this text would not be the. Your credo.

11:41 Mark: No.

11:41 Dylan: Well, so I agree with you about that. That's probably true that I'm more of an optimist by nature. But the themes of absurdity and how did the challenges of worth and how that plays out, I think that philosophical exegesis that you have and the way you say, one of the things I'm bringing to this whole thing is to try to put a. A philosophical structure around it. And that I think is super profitable in it. And so that, I mean, that's my first impressions was that, yeah, as much

12:19 Mark: as I enjoyed these frameworks that you were, Jesse, attaching this to, like the one that Wes mentioned, because if you're going to say life is meaningless or death is bad, then like, well, what does that mean? What are the problems that other philosophers have raised about these issues? In some ways, it's of course, a great way to more deeply understand the issues that text is raising. But in terms of understanding the text itself, I sort of see it as extra, as not necessary. I think people can get something through this from reading it by itself.

The thing that I think people get through it, it's somebody who's at the end of their life. They've been in a position of power, not deprivation, so they could try everything. And it's all what's often translated as vanity. This word hevel that we'll talk about that. There are lots of meanings. I was sort of reading it, though, in a modern context, as it's all bullshit, so you could give a philosophical reading. In fact, you referred us to this, the Meaning of Hebel for Qohelet by Michael v. Fox in 1986, which is very much duplicated in. You've pulled all the juice out of that in your chapter two of your book as well.

So either one of those will cover these various. Does it mean just breath? Does it mean impermanence? Does it mean futility? Does it mean absurdity? Oh, we can bring up Camus. We can compare it so we got all this negative stuff. But then he does have some positive stuff that, well, enjoy your life while it's here. Some people compare this to Epicurus, that we're never going to understand the big things. Don't create problems for yourself, but it's still. You can enjoy the moment as it comes. And then, you know, per the very religious podcast that people can readily find if they search on itunes for this, there's also, it seems like, well, if we can't understand, everything seems bullshit, everything seems futile when just looking in the realm of experience under the sun.

Well, once you allow God in, allow Jesus in, allow something, you know, we can then read this in the context of the Bible. You couldn't get meaning from the human world, so you have to go to the supernatural world. And I guess that's a key because. Right. That is read as the entire point of the book by. I don't want to say traditional biblical scholars, but advocates of the religion in question that they just say, yes, this just shows you that all is vanity unless you have God. And then it all redeems everything. I mean, can we give some initial reactions like.

Because to me, that would be a very boring way to read this book.

14:43 Wes: Like, you know, I want to underline one aspect of your point, right? Because he. There's the question of the futility of toil in general, of work in general, and then there's wisdom. So the kinds of work that we do in trying to understand the world, philosophy, science, that's a particular kind of work that people often, you know, at least philosophy, right. Are they're looking to. And it's adjacent to religion, at least in theology. It's the type of thing that people are typically looking to for something meaningful. Right. We got done recently with Marx on Alienation as well. Presumably there are some types of work that are meaningful and it depends on how one is related to that work. But here, his view is that there's something futile even about wisdom, and we can talk about why.

15:38 Dylan: Yeah, I don't even know if this is the place to talk about why meaning matters, why human beings can have an existential crisis or wonder if it was all worth it. Dogs don't do that. Right.

15:49 Wes: Dogs aren't interested in recognition. Right. They're not psychically constituted by, in part, by the recognition of another. And so this is.

15:58 Dylan: Yeah, well, that's an interesting thing because it's clear there's hierarchy, and my dog likes it when I come home. But anyway, I don't want that. That's a side note.

16:06 Seth: Okay.

16:06 Dylan: I don't want to go down that road. I did want to ask, before we get too far, about this vanity word. So do all you guys read that vanity of vanities in terms of it's all in vain, futile? Because when I. Maybe when I read the word vanity, I end up going to the direction of understanding something as being narcissistic or hubristic as opposed to futile. So I was just so confused by that word in the translation. I'm like, what are you talking about? How does this word even make any sense? Which probably is just an indication that I was misunderstanding it. But that word vanity, like, even the word. Like the word that we use for setting up a. Holding up the sink in your bathroom is a vanity. Right?

16:57 Wes: Yeah. And then there's vanity in the sense of in vain. But.

17:00 Dylan: No, I understand.

17:00 Wes: Maybe Jesse can speak to this, like, this particular translation and the many different possible meanings of this word.

17:07 Dylan: And I'm also just wondering if you guys. When you guys read that, do you immediately, like, read that first? It's in the first five or six words where that vein or vanity is used. Like five or six might be a

17:18 Wes: bit dated, I think, as a translation. But, Jesse, what do you think?

17:23 Jesse: Yeah, I mean, it's had a long history in terms of translating the Hebrew word, which is this word hevel, which is what the whole Michael Fox article is about, as we've already alluded to. But as far as you're asking about the English vanity that comes from the Latin vanitas, It was the word that Jerome used in the Vulgate translation of the Bible way back in the 4th century. So it just became the word at that point that standard translations used. And so by the time you get to King James version 1200 years later or so becomes the English vanity. The basic meaning as far as understanding,

18:01 Dylan: it's the transliteration of the Latin interpretation of the Hebrew, I don't know if

18:04 Jesse: that is transliteration, because English has developed a word from Latin. The word vanity means the same thing.

18:11 Dylan: And it means the same thing.

18:12 Jesse: Yeah, I mean, emptiness, something like that, as far as I understand.

18:15 Dylan: So that's the thing that I was exactly resonating against. Okay? So the notion of something being in vain, and maybe this is just because it's an overloaded word, but when I hear the word vanity, I don't hear the word in vain. I don't hear vanity coming with the baggage of something being futile. Right. And so.

18:36 Wes: But I think historically it had more of that connotation. I just think that connotation is less prevalent these days.

18:42 Dylan: Yeah, that's fine.

18:43 Jesse: I think that's the starting point of the word. And then what you're thinking of sort of being narcissistic was derived from this starting point.

18:50 Wes: Okay.

18:51 Jesse: And is now how we more use it today.

18:53 Wes: Okay.

18:53 Mark: Yeah, but I like this Socratic resonance of the word. Like, the people that Socrates would be talking to were confused. It's because they're vain. That is literally the sort of confusion, the sort of cluelessness which reflects. We're going to relate this to, say, absurdity is a better translation of it then.

19:14 Dylan: Right.

19:14 Mark: For Camus, you. You want to become woke to absurdism. So if you are just complacently going through your life all puffed up about your little accomplishments, then you are asleep. In some ways you are vain. In some ways, you do not realize that what you are doing is in vain is futile. You could see from a broader perspective, you will see that this competition that you are engaged in just doesn't matter. Everybody got it. You and the winners and the losers are all going to be dead. Nobody is going to remember them. Okay, Maybe somebody in the next generation, the next generation after that, they're all going to be forgotten.

Even if there's posterity, which it's always ironic when somebody says, nobody will remember me, you know, Marcus Aurelius. Or somebody says, nobody will remember. And then we're talking about them thousands of years later, like, clearly somebody remembers some of them. But you want to still say from a thousand, a million foot perspective, we're just on this little tiny planet that will probably snuff out at some point and everything's going to be lost. And, you know, what does it matter in the great scheme of things? Which of course, then naturally leads to those issues that your chapter two discusses, this hebble question, but then also discusses, like, would it for be.

For something to be meaningful? Does it have to actually resonate with the universe and be really permanent. Does it have to have cosmic significance to actually. Or is this an unreasonable demand for meaning that maybe the dog satisfaction in his dish, right? You should be an epicurean. You should lower your standards. You should stop being so vain, so pretentious about your demands for meaning and just be satisfied with the things that we can actually have access to.

20:53 Wes: I think this pits two of the classical parts of the soul against each other, right? The epicurean says, why isn't the erotic good enough? And then Thomas, the thymotic part of the soul, the spirited part of the soul, prioritizes recognition. And if we are thinking in Nietzsche in terms power, right? And people will impose enormous amounts of pain on themselves, going against the pleasure principle, going against the erotic in favor of power or prestige, which I. I think is where this idea of meaning ultimately is located, right? The laments here, as Jesse points out, have a lot to do with how one is going to be seen after death and whether one can imprint oneself on the world, imprint one's character on the world, which I think is part of this.

This idea of toil, right? The idea that your business is going to be taken over by someone and they're going to squander it. It's not just that the business is going to be squandered, but the. Your legacy, your something that is indicative of your character is going to vanish. So recognition in some sense just can't happen in the way that we fantasize it. Although we should ask ourselves the question of why God can't perform this function. And God stands in, in a way, is always a counterpoint to under the sun. What happens under the sun, right?

It happens under the metaphorical vision of this unifying entity. But the entity can't really see anything, but God can see things. So that's right. The sun is evocative of the promise of everything being seen, which is what recognition is about. And it might join that and unify sight from generation to generation so that it wouldn't be lost. The sun can't really do that. So it's an apt image here. But also I think it's a very pagan image. And one might ask the question, well, why can't God be the great Recognizer? Because I think historically in philosophy we'll see that that is one of God's primary functions, to be the big recognizer who can supply meaning by filling that realm.

23:00 Mark: That sun is just heavy. It promises all this doesn't deliver.

23:05 Dylan: I think it's really useful to bring up the notion of recognition and the quest for meaning in terms of the effect that an individual that you have on the world and like whether that endures in any way. It does contrast to me with the notion of just a relief of suffering or the presence of eternal bliss kind of interpretation of why we would what awaits our eternal soul. So there's interesting in Ecclesiastes is the notion that that's not worth the end a eternity of blissful non suffering is not worth the price of admission. Right. That's not going to give meaning.

23:52 Seth: Should we focus. Turn to the text a little bit here?

23:55 Wes: And yeah, I was trying to get us to do that by thinking about under the sun phrase. Could I raise a question about that there is nothing new under the sun. Yeah, go ahead, Jesse.

24:05 Jesse: So I guess the question is. Yeah, so Mark earlier alluded to that often Christian interpreters and you guys have kind of played on this a little bit, have taken that as well. What's the opposite of under the sun? It's over the sun. It's in the eternal realm, it's in the heavenly realm, and everything sort of gets redeemed. And maybe connecting that to what Wes said as far as there, God is the great recognizer, even if everything in your earthly life is futile or heavily or whatever. And I want to raise that as a question is that what's implied here is the opposite of why does he use that phrase? What does it mean? Is the opposite of under the sun over the sun or is it something else? And I have an idea, but I sort of want to hear what you guys say.

24:47 Wes: I want to hear. Yeah, I was hoping to hear your idea about that when I brought that up. Yeah.

24:53 Seth: Okay.

24:54 Jesse: Well, so I mean, partly it's just a linguistic question, like what might that phrase under the sun have meant in this time period? He uses it a ton, but it's like, well, does anyone else use it? And in fact, we do have other instances actually outside of the Bible in some inscriptions that I believe are from the 5th century that are written in Aramaic. And the same phrase is used and it's from this king who died, King Tabnit's tomb. There are these like curses written on the outside of it cursing anyone who might come in and mess anything up or steal his bones or do anything to the corpse.

And basically says, may you be cursed in Sheol. You'll have no progeny under the sun. And it seems like the idea. And there's a couple that are like this that say something similar and the idea seems to be that under the sun is used as just meaning on earth in the realm where you can be shown on by the sun, as opposed to Sheol, the realm of the dead, where there is none of that. And so I think that that's what Qohelet means by the use of the phrase. He's just talking about life on earth. This is our experience of life on earth, is this heavy, this futility, absurdity, etc.

And I don't think the opposite that he has in mind is some great eternal realm. It's just the realm of the dead, the realm of Sheol. Again, that's the Hebrew word for, you might say the equivalent of Hades in Greek, something close to that. Which he does use the word in chapter 9, verse 10, where he says sheol, the place that you are going to is a place where there is no work, no thought, no knowledge, no enjoyment. Those are the things that we get under the sun alongside the futility that we also get under the sun. And that's all opposed to when you're dead.

So I think that's his opposition is the realm of death, not the eternal realm.

26:51 Mark: Yeah, I figured it was sort of idiomatic, like in the Chinese, you know, talking about the 10,000 things. We're just talking about everything. And I tend to want to read this whole text in a very deflationary manner so that like when he brings up God, it's not because God is the secret that will get you out of the rest of the conclusions. It's just that of course, the writer and everybody who would read and yet believes in God and so sort of saying, well, you know, you can enjoy these things that God has given us. It just means like that life has given us.

Right? I mean, there's. I'm not saying he's not. He's a secret atheist or anything like this, but I'm just saying that it's almost axiomatic that of course if there's something on earth, it was provided by God. We're not making a big deal about that fact. That's not actually the point of the book because it's unhelpful, like, we don't know enough about God, we don't know enough about God's plan. It's almost irrelevant. It's not that praising the name of God will then undo and sanctify everything else that's said here. I mean, is that too much of an overreaction to the Christian interpreters here?

How did other people read this for

27:58 Seth: me, what's initially striking about this is how sort of autobiographical or biographical it is. There's the question of why this particular figure wrote this. And there's a bigger question of, like, how did it get included in the canonical books of the Bible? But this is a very personal lament is how it kind of really starts off. And the supposition here is, I, this is a man who was a successful business person, has lived a long life. It's unclear whether I was unclear after my reading whether he had family or not. But the idea is this is somebody reflecting in an advanced age, or at least after having lived a relatively full life and accomplished some things and saying, what was the point?

Why did I do all these things? And what. And saying things like, well, there's no guarantee that I'll be rewarded for these efforts. There's no guarantee that my legacy will be taken care of, my business when I pass it on. And I've seen the just be punished and the unjust go unpunished. The format of this is the kind of thing that you would normally see somebody, like, writing a letter to a young friend, right. Or, you know, like. So I would assume that the person that the author is not just spitting into the wind and writing this in a vacuum.

There must have been a lively debate around this subject matter at the time. Or addressing somebody in their personal lives, like, who, you know, but is basically trying to answer a very big existential philosophical question through the lens of his own personal experience and biography. And in that sense, I have to say, Mark, that the God stuff in many respects is like window dressing, I think. And I don't mean that it's not meaningful or important so much as it's not central to the narrative of the book. And you can do a very profitable reading of the book itself without addressing the issue of God.

There's a lot to do without getting to the God piece, I guess you could say.

30:15 Dylan: Yeah.

30:15 Wes: Although I do want to say that again, I think God historically is going to theologically serve this function that he's lamenting is missing. So just again, looking at this first section, Reflections of a Royal Philosopher, we should get into this idea. The people of long ago are not remembered, nor will there be any remembrance of people yet to come by those who come after them. This goes towards this idea of the failure of recognition and the failure of memory. And it's associated with this previous line, there is nothing new under the sun. Which I take to mean there's no way really to distinguish oneself.

Anyway, you may seem to be Able to distinguish yourself by doing something new or formidable within a given time. But time will show that that is not the case. And again, the implicit contrast, I think the image of the sun is quite evocative of this problem because the sun seems to confer light, right? Mark called it the domain of experience. It seems to be a unifying element. Plato, right, thought of it as something that you could look to as a metaphor for participation. It's the thing that you can potentially unify the particulars under a given form.

But in this case, the sun can't perform something analogous to that function, which is to unify experience of human beings across generations, to create memory and to sustain recognition. So I think, yeah, whether or not so God, right, I don't think rises to the level of performing that function in Ecclesiastes, which is one of the really interesting things about it. He doesn't try to take that way out as far as I can tell. But we should keep in mind that later on, right, it becomes, it seems to theologically to become one of the major functions of a.

Of a deity for us to be seen by him, for there to be some entity that has a view from nowhere and that also joins experience and creates a kind of memory for the

32:27 Dylan: world and a value for those things, right? So in the way you're talking about it, everything under the sun, all of experience, all of the world, there's nothing new there. In that way. It's also falls prey to being under God's domain too, right? In the sense that there's nothing new there because it's all been created and it's all happened. But as you're pointing out, crucially, the effect of an individual in my own life under the sun would involve there being something new created there. And that you're pointing out is tied directly to recognition for that, that somehow your mark can be traced. There might be a variety of ways in which that recognition could happen. And you're suggesting that it's through God, but it's the mark of the individual as having some effect on the world, right?

33:24 Wes: The sun can shed light on everything and it can ground experience in a sense, metaphorically, but it won't recognize you. Well, we need more than light. We need more than a mirror.

33:33 Jesse: We need a mirror.

33:33 Dylan: We need a mirror.

33:34 Wes: We need the other consciousness to ground self consciousness. We want that grounding not to be contingent. We want it not to simply be human and to depend on human, perishable human communities. We want it to be absolute. We want it to be the Absolute. And that is what the whole point of the absolute is, to have the recognizing function written in stone, so to speak.

33:57 Dylan: Yeah. Importantly, you can't do that recognition yourself, meaning that mark you are not capable as an individual to recognize. To understand the mark that you made on the world yourself, it requires someone

34:11 Mark: else brought to mind. I just sent folks a link to the As You Like It quote would go with many of the things in Ecclesiastes. All the world's a stage and the men and women only players. We have our exits, our entrance. In other words, we are at the mercy of fate, God, as to when we enter and exit and what part we play. But there's also the implication, which is not in this quote here, that it is a performance for someone. Right. If we are on a stage, if you want to take that metaphor literally, we're like God's tv. That's what makes our life meaningful, is God is watching us and gets his jollies out of that.

34:45 Wes: And we should keep in mind that everything is sound and fury signifying nothing.

34:50 Mark: Yeah.

34:51 Wes: Which is also Shakespeare. Yeah.

34:54 Jesse: This is great. I like what you're bringing up, Wes. And I was going to point out that the Epilogue, it's called here in the NRSV that we're looking at. You can see the section called Epilogue at the very end of the book, which is 12, nine through 14. And just to be clear that that is a section thought to be written by someone else. I mean, presumably you had that idea while reading it because it speaks of Qohelet in the third person. Most of the book is Qohelet speaking in the first person, apart from the introduction in verses one and two of the first chapter.

And then it's. He kind of introduces himself. Chapter one, verse twelve, I, the teacher, or I Cohelet. And then it mostly kind of reads like an autobiography, using the first person voice for most of it. And then you get to the end, though, and it's 12, Nine says, besides being wise, the teacher also taught the people knowledge and kind of goes on there speaking about him. But then you get the famous verse, which is 13, the end of the matter, all has been heard. Fear God and keep his commandments, for that is the whole duty of everyone. For God will bring every deed into judgment, including every secret thing, whether good or evil.

So what I wanted to point out is that you could take that couple of verses to signify what you are bringing up kind of God as the great judge or recognizer who's stringing together all of History with his memory and his judgment. But I just want to point out that is, in my view, written by someone else that's some sort of epilogist, some sort of redactor or editor who has come along later. And this is the pretty standard view, that someone came along that was a bit turned off by Qohelet's heterodox style teaching and wanted to make it a little bit more orthodox for the people.

36:43 Wes: It was his CBT therapist.

36:46 Jesse: Yeah, sure. But also his PR person. I would say it's a little more his PR person in the sense of Kohele might have been dead by this point. But just in terms of, okay, this is going to be a public document that Jews of this period are reading. I don't know if we actually want them reading all this stuff about hevel and absurdity and meaninglessness. So let's just add to the end a couple lines about God is still going to judge you. Everything you've been taught in the Torah and the law is still true.

37:14 Wes: Okay.

37:14 Jesse: So don't take this too seriously. That's usually what is thought to be going on there. I should add, though, that there are. There's a minority of scholars that think that Qohelet is a character that the writer of the book made up so that the. The writer is the one, well, writing all of it, but in the sense that his voice comes out at the very beginning and the end and that he's simply introducing this character called Qohelet. I don't think that. I think Qohelet there was a, so to speak, historical Qohelet, and then that this is actually a later editor that came along and added that ending.

37:47 Wes: Yeah. So what's the theological purpose of this or the religious purpose of this? Having something that is so pessimistic if it's not going to be redeemed again by the PR person at the end of it?

38:01 Dylan: Well, isn't the argument that you have to have it redeemed by a PR person at the end of it is why you end up having to include it? So you're asking why would someone have included it in a set of canonical texts that were part of a Bible without that?

38:20 Wes: I mean, we see something maybe similar in Job, so there's some similarity there. The Old Testament is engaged with suffering and absurdity, maybe even skepticism concerning God, I think.

38:35 Dylan: Well, skepticism and then also the absurdity that God is revealed through some kinds of absurdities. I'm thinking about the whole Isaac story, right. That Kierkegaard goes off on.

38:46 Wes: Right.

38:46 Dylan: That the whole notion that you would sacrifice your child has a deep amount of absurdity to it, but is also the demonstration that you believe.

38:59 Mark: Yeah, I just don't know that we should be surprised in the Old Testament of things being delivered that just say, this is what is wisdom. Life is bleak and not fair, period. And then we collect this. It sounds like this was put together,

39:16 Wes: I mean, because they didn't have WI fi back then. So, yeah, it'd be very funny if

39:20 Mark: a 30 year old, in fact wrote this with a character that's just like. Because I feel like you see that in modern memes or disinformation or whatever all the time of. I could tell you that Trump is really bad because I used to be a die hard Trumper and I loved Trump and I did this trip and no, it's probably a bunch of bullshit by somebody who was never in favor of Trump in the first place. Is there a chance that this is this dismissal of all things? Because I think by the time you're even. We associate younger people with the ones who actually have this kind of thought that they're so jaded.

By the time you actually get old, then you're like, oh, I'm relaxing and I'm appreciating things in the way that this does sort of recommend parts in this text. But is there a chance that this is actually not the wisdom of the aged, but somebody putting what they think the wisdom of the aged would be? Is that even a useful line of thought?

40:13 Jesse: Anything's possible.

40:14 Wes: Shall we discuss the futility of seeking wisdom before we end this first part?

40:20 Dylan: I do think there's something to what you're saying, Mark, in that I could imagine reading this as someone who's looking out in the world as a early adult and seeing all these things happening and wondering about what is the place of ambition at all? And a kind of not a late life existential crisis, but a pre beginning, pre full on life existential crisis.

40:47 Wes: Right.

40:48 Mark: That's definitely when I had mine because I saw from year to year my own growth as you grow up. And when I'm 14, I'm like, God, when I was 13, I was so stupid and so clueless. But then after a point it just stops. And then you feel like, oh, actually I'm just as dumb now at age 30 as I was at 25. You might feel like this at least. It's not the same, actually. I had this conversation with somebody in college, so that's when I reached, yes, exactly this point. Anyway, I feel like I've made that. Made the point enough. The futility of seeking wisdom. So these subheadings in. So tell us again why. I know you're Jesse, putting out your own translation and we get bits of it in your book, but the one we read is the nrsv. What is. That's just because that's what people use, that we link people.

41:36 Jesse: Oh, there are many English translations that people use. This is actually one that comes out of the King James Version. Lineage. You could say translations have lineages. When they do a translation in English, they don't necessarily start over. They definitely, absolutely are drawing on the Hebrew. Not just drawing, they're doing it from the Hebrew, but they're also in line with a lineage, perhaps. And so this is coming out. There was a kjv and then there was the rsv, and then there was the New, that stands for Revised Standard

42:07 Dylan: Standard Version and the New Revised Standard Version.

42:10 Jesse: New Revised Standard Version. So pretty soon there'll be the, you know, new New or whatever. But it is in line with that classic kjv, which, you know, it is a beautiful text, the King James Version. Obviously, there's reasons we don't want to read it anymore with all the Thees and thous and so on. But some of the lines that we, you know, that you quoted at the beginning, the race does not belong to the Swift, or there's a time for everything under the sun, or, you know, these classic lines, it's nice to read them in their classic form. When you're reading a book like this.

And the NRSV does maintain that, and it's just closer to the Hebrew a little bit more on the literal side than some of the other translations that are a bit looser. Not that one approach is right or wrong, but when you're studying it, it's. And when I teach it in class, it's nice to be a little bit closer to the Hebrew, right?

42:56 Mark: Well, if folks have been frustrated that we haven't actually gotten and read more than two lines of this thing yet, I would encourage you, we will link to the deck version that we're talking about. It is only 11 pages long. So just before you listen to part two of this podcast, just go read the 11 pages, or at least the first few pages, and you'll get most of the, you know, historically juicy stuff and maybe skip to the. The end, the. The part that Jesse was talking about, the positive part that was probably an amended by somebody else. In any case, we are very grateful for your listening to this.

Hope you come back to part two next week or if you become a Partially Examined Life supporter, one of the many ways I'll describe@pre partiallyexaminelife.com support then it should be the next thing in your feed very soon. Unless you do it through Apple, then you still have to wait a week for various reasons. See you soon. Thanks.

43:46 Jesse: Thank you.

43:47 Dylan: Thank you.