Investigation: Time, Eternity and the Limits of Knowing

"He hath made every thing beautiful in his time: also he hath set the world in their heart, so that no man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end" (3:11).

"As thou knowest not what is the way of the spirit… even so thou knowest not the works of God who maketh all" (11:5).

Et and zeman

Et is the ordinary Hebrew word for a time or occasion; it occurs throughout the book, and 29 times in 3:1–8 alone. Zeman (3:1), a late word borrowed from Aramaic, means an appointed time. The poem's times are not a calendar but the occasions of a human life.

3:11 in the versions

Greek ton aiona (the age, eternity; Giguet "le monde entier"); Latin mundum (world) "handed over to their disputing"; KJV "the world"; NIV, ESV "eternity"; NRSV "a sense of past and future"; proposed repointing elem "ignorance." No witness has different consonants; this is a translation question, not a textual one. See the passage page.

Knowledge and faith

Qoheleth's "cannot find out" is not skepticism about God's existence but about human access to God's purposes. It leads to fear of God (3:14) and to receiving the present gift (3:12–13; 9:7). Paul's "How unsearchable are his judgments" (Romans 11:33) and Job 38–41 express related humility.

"Remember"

Memory is a thread through the book: no remembrance of former generations (1:11), the wise not remembered (2:16), the poor wise man forgotten (9:15), the dead's memory lost (9:5), remember the days of darkness (11:8), and finally "Remember now thy Creator" (12:1). The book moves from human forgetting to a command to remember God.

"Who knows?"

Qoheleth repeatedly asks mi yodea, "who knows?": who knows whether the heir will be wise (2:19), whether the human spirit goes up (3:21), what is good for a person (6:12), the interpretation of a thing (8:1). The same question appears in Joel 2:14 and Jonah 3:9 as a hope ("who knows if God will turn?"). In Ecclesiastes it marks the edge of human knowledge.

Cycles and history

Some scholars compared 1:4–11 with Greek ideas of eternal recurrence (the Stoic doctrine that the universe repeats itself). Qoheleth's cycles are observations of nature and of human forgetfulness, not a cosmology; he speaks of God's work from beginning to end (3:11) and of judgment (3:17), neither of which fits a strictly cyclical cosmos.