{"id":14668,"date":"2013-09-26T20:21:37","date_gmt":"2013-09-27T00:21:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2013\/09\/26\/14668.html"},"modified":"2018-03-13T19:06:22","modified_gmt":"2018-03-14T00:06:22","slug":"ecclesiastes-it-begins","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2013\/09\/26\/ecclesiastes-it-begins\/","title":{"rendered":"Ecclesiastes: it begins"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

So. Ecclesiastes<\/a>. What the hell?\n

I’ve been reading the thing in preparation, and I have to say: this is a strange, scary, bad book. This may not be fun. On the other hand, it is perhaps more important to do the work to dig into a strange, scary bad book than it is to read, say, Ruth<\/a>. Not that Ruth<\/cite> doesn’t have its own problems. But this is… different. The Anchor version’s introduction begins with R.B.Y. Scott saying Ecclesiastes is the strangest book in the Bible<\/i>. The Cambridge Bible Commentary<\/cite> edition starts with a section called The Problem of the Book<\/strong>. My favorite line is from Edward Plumptre, who starts his book<\/a> by saying not only that every interpreter of this book thinks that all previous interpreters have been wrong<\/i> but by saying that this aspect of the book has become almost a proverb<\/i>. He wrote this in 1880. And then he wrote that I can honestly say that I have worked through the arguments by which the writers have supported them <\/i>[conclusions about Ecclesiastes] and have not found them satisfy the laws of evidence or the conditions of historical probability<\/i>. In other words, all previous interpreters really have been wrong. Likely this was true, and likely it is still true. I am certainly not going to change that.\n

I do not have the Key<\/strong> to the book; I am not looking for the Key. What am I looking for? Well, and I never really know until I find it, and often not then, but I suppose what I am looking for is how I, as a reader and believer living in my world, can reach through the text to the Divine—if I believe that the text is Scripture, it is by its essence a Divine message, not just to the people of its time but to me right now. That’s my definition of Scripture, and why I consider Scripture to be miraculous stuff, different ontologically from non-Scripture. I am looking for that message primarily for myself, but also for people who are in some sense like me<\/i>—living in my culture at my time, speaking my language, sharing much of my perception of the universe.\n

That does require looking at the context it was written in, looking at the meaning of the text, what it might have meant to the writer at the time, what it might have meant to its first readers. It isn’t constrained<\/i> to those meanings, but it is informed<\/i> by them. I can conclude that the meaning for me<\/i> is not what it was for the ancient People of Israel, but my method involves attempting at least to ascertain what that meaning was. If only to reject it and keep looking. So I’m going to be looking, as best I can, into the language and the poetry as well as the meaning and the context. I’m going to be looking for metaphors and balances (tho’ triples are evidently rare in our text, which as Gentle Readers will be aware is a sadness for Your Humble Blogger). I’m going to be looking for resonances elsewhere in Scripture. I’m going to be looking at different translations, if only to find out what the text meant to the translators. I’m going to be looking at some of the rabbinic commentary, to the extent that I can easily track it down. And I’m hoping I will be looking at your suggestions and interpretations, too, Gentle Readers. Don’t make me do this by myself.\n

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Which Your Humble Blogger lays out a plan of attack. That’ll last a few verses, I betcha.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[207],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14668","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-scripture"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14668","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14668"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14668\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16662,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14668\/revisions\/16662"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14668"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14668"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14668"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}