Times Appointed, the Whole Beyond Reach

Two words for time open the poem. “Season” is zeman, a late Hebrew word for an appointed moment that turns up elsewhere only in Esther and Nehemiah; “time” is the ordinary et. “Purpose” is chephets, delight or desire, and so any matter someone cares about.

Verses 2 to 8 hold fourteen pairs, twenty-eight times in all, and the list opens with the two that no one chooses. To pluck up what is planted is a farmer’s work too: an old vine or an exhausted orchard has to come out before the ground can be used again.

Healing sits beside killing, so the first may mean the physician’s choice, or the battle and the field hospital, rather than murder. Break down and build up are two of the six verbs of Jeremiah’s commission in Jeremiah 1:10, “to root out, and to pull down... to build, and to plant.”

The second pair rhymes in Hebrew, sephod and reqod, to mourn and to dance. Mourning here is the loud public lament of a funeral, with wailing and beating of the breast, not quiet private sorrow. The dance is its opposite in public too.

Casting and gathering stones is unexplained. Clearing a field of stones before ploughing, or piling them for a wall, are the plainest readings; 2 Kings 3:19 shows armies ruining fields by throwing stones in. The Jewish midrash on Ecclesiastes read it as a euphemism for the marriage bed, matching the embrace that follows.

“Get” is baqqesh, to seek, and “lose” is to let go as lost: a time to search and a time to stop searching. The second pair moves from what is found to what is owned, the choice of what to hold on to and what to throw out.

Rending is the torn garment of grief, as Jacob tore his clothes over Joseph in Genesis 37:34; sewing is the mending once mourning ends. Job’s friends kept the time to keep silence properly, sitting with him seven days “and none spake a word” (Job 2:13).

The last two pairs are crossed: love, hate, then war, peace, so the poem that began with birth ends on shalom. The final two are nouns rather than verbs, “a time of war”, as if love and hate are things people do while war and peace are conditions they live in.

“He that worketh” is ha’oseh, the doer, from the verb asah. The same verb returns in verses 11 and 14 for “the work that God maketh” and “whatsoever God doeth”. Human doing is set against divine doing inside a few lines.

The line repeats 1:13 almost exactly, but two things have gone: the searching “by wisdom” and the adjective “sore”. The business given by God is simply named this time, not complained of.

“Beautiful” is yapheh, fitting or lovely, the word used of Rachel and of David. The King James “world” follows the later Hebrew sense of olam, which in the rabbis’ usage does mean the world. A few scholars repoint the consonants to read elem, “ignorance”, which would say God has also set darkness in the heart.

“No good in them” means nothing better for people. “To do good in his life” may carry the idiom of faring well, closer to “enjoy himself” than to charitable acts, which is how several modern versions take it; the pairing with “rejoice” supports that reading.

“Gift” is mattat, and the phrase “gift of God” comes back in 5:19 in the same words. The sentence stacks three verbs, eat, drink and see good, and then turns the whole of it into something received rather than earned.

“Nothing can be put to it, nor any thing taken from it” uses the verbs of Deuteronomy 4:2, where Israel must neither add to God’s word nor diminish from it. This is the first time the book speaks of fearing God, the note on which it will end in 12:13.

The last clause is literally “God seeks what is driven away” or “what is pursued”. The King James reads it as God calling the past back to account. The Greek translators and the Targum read it as God seeking out the persecuted, and Sirach 5:3 seems to echo that sense.

The Hebrew uses one word twice, resha, wickedness, where the King James varies it to “wickedness” and “iniquity”. Mishpat is the court’s verdict, and tsedeq the standard of right the court is meant to keep.

The closing “there” is abrupt in Hebrew and may point to God’s own court, where every matter will have its hearing. Some scholars repoint it as a verb, “he has appointed”. Either way the language of verse 1, “a time to every purpose”, is brought in to cover judgment.

“Concerning the estate of” is the phrase the Psalms use for “after the order of Melchizedek” (Psalm 110:4), meaning “in the matter of”. “Manifest” renders a verb of sifting or testing, barar: God separates people out so they may see themselves plainly.

Miqreh, “what befalls”, comes three times in the Hebrew: the sons of men are a happening, the beasts are a happening, one happening befalls them all. “One breath” is ruach, the same word as “spirit” two verses later. “Preeminence” is motar, a cousin of yitron, the book’s word for profit.

“All are of the dust, and all turn to dust again” takes up Genesis 3:19, “dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return”, and extends it from Adam to every living thing. “One place” is the grave; 6:6 asks the same question: “do not all go to one place?”

The King James reads statements, “the spirit of man that goeth upward”, following the vowels of the Hebrew text, which make the letter he an article. The Greek and other ancient versions read the same letter as “whether”: who knows whether the spirit of man goes upward?

“Portion” returns from 2:10. The question at the end, who can show a man what will come after him, is asked again in 6:12 and 10:14. It can mean after his death or simply after his time, and the book leaves both open.