Ecclesiastes

Under the sun is the book's own phrase, used around thirty times, and it marks the boundary of the enquiry. It means the world as anyone can observe it, with no appeal to anything outside it. That is a deliberate limit rather than an oversight, and everything the book concludes is concluded inside it.

Wisdom writing was an international trade. Egypt and Mesopotamia produced instruction texts and sceptical dialogues for centuries, and some of them sound startlingly like this one: a man arguing with his own soul about whether living is worth it, or a servant agreeing with every contradictory thing his master proposes. Israel's contribution sits inside that conversation rather than apart from it.

And what Proverbs claims is the thing this book is testing. Proverbs offers a world that works: diligence produces plenty, righteousness produces long life, folly produces ruin. Ecclesiastes reports the exceptions and then refuses to treat them as exceptions. Job does the same from a different direction, with one man's case instead of a survey.

The economic detail is real too. Chapter 5 describes officials watching officials, absentee owners, and wealth that cannot be slept on. That is the world of a small province inside a large empire, where the money and the decisions are made a long way off.

The world of chapter five is a province inside an empire. One official watched by a higher one, and higher ones over them, is the administrative reality of Persian-period Judah: a small territory whose taxes and decisions travelled a long way off. The book offers that chain as a reason not to be astonished by injustice, which is a bleak sort of realism rather than an endorsement of it.

Money in that economy was silver by weight and land, not a number held somewhere safe. It was physical, on the premises and vulnerable, which is why the observation that a rich man cannot sleep is literal rather than figurative.

Vows were binding transactions with a real institution. A person promised something to God in exchange for something wanted, and the law took a broken vow seriously. When the book says do not tell the messenger it was a mistake, the messenger is somebody who has come to collect.

And the movement's title is the book's own claim, made three separate times in chapter eight. However hard a person works at it, and however confidently the wise say they have it, nobody can find out the work that is done under the sun. That is a limit on knowledge, stated by somebody who went and tried.

Sheol is not hell. In the Hebrew Bible it is the grave, the place of the dead, and it is characterised by inactivity rather than by punishment: no work, no planning, no knowledge, no wisdom. When this book says the dead know nothing, that is what it is describing, not making a claim about judgement, and the hope that grows later in the collection is a development rather than a correction.

White garments and oil on the head were what people wore to a feast. Telling somebody to wear them always is telling them to dress for a celebration on an ordinary day, which is a stronger instruction than it looks in English.

The permission that has appeared five times so far arrives here in the imperative, for the only time in the book. Go, eat, drink, let, enjoy, do. This is the one stretch of Ecclesiastes that gives orders.

And the closing poem's imagery is drawn from a household. The keepers of the house tremble, the strong men stoop, the grinders cease because they are few, those looking through the windows grow dim, the door to the street is shut. Readers have decoded it line by line as an anatomy of aging, and it works as one. It also works simply as a house running down, which is what the poem actually describes.