How Jewish World-Weariness Puts Christianity and Islam to Shame

Jewish existentialism and the miracles of Ecclesiastes

There are two miracles pertaining to Ecclesiastes, one of the “Writings” in the Tanakh and a “Wisdom” book in the Christian Old Testament. The first miracle is that Ecclesiastes was canonized in the first place, given its contents. That should almost be miracle enough to compel conversion to Judaism if those contents didn’t so thoroughly undermine theistic beliefs of all kinds.

The second miracle is that so many Christian and Islamic follies nevertheless happened in religious traditions that sprouted from the Judaism that included Ecclesiastes.

The contents of Ecclesiastes are astonishing, compared to the rest of the Bible. Ecclesiastes is relatively short, so if you haven’t yet read it, you should do so without delay.

Ecclesiastes combines moderate Epicurean hedonism with unsparing proto-existentialism, skepticism, and pessimism. Coming towards the end of the Tanakh, even after the Book of Job, Ecclesiastes effectively presents the upshot of the Hebrew scriptures, which is one of pure jadedness.

After all, Judaism reflects the culture of a perennially conquered and oppressed people who saved themselves from despair not just by trusting in their almighty God but by seeing the comical aspect of life and even of religion. Jews were the underdogs, the nomadic outsiders who scoffed at human empires because Jews believed they had an invincible sovereign at their backs, despite their apparent lowly position in the ancient world.

This Lord of theirs was invisible; indeed, Jews forbade representations of him, not because a supernatural God is indistinguishable from nothingness, as might have seemed evident, but because Jews were opposed to idolatry.

But perhaps the true purpose of Yahweh’s hiddenness was to maintain the irony and thus the satirical power of Jewish monotheism: the implication was that the tyranny of oppressive human kings is as empty as the sovereignty of the Jewish God who enables his chosen people, the Jews, to be repeatedly conquered, and who will avenge them only in a final apocalyptic judgment, at a date that can always be pushed further into the future, running out everyone’s clocks in the meantime.

This accounts, then, for why the subversive power of Ecclesiastes had to be mitigated with a phony pious epilogue to enable its canonicity. Somewhere in Hebrew scriptures the secret heart of the Jewish message had to be stated openly; the gloves of orthopraxy had to come off at some point in their historical ordeal when Jews otherwise clutched at their rituals and morality and grievances. Their insights had to coalesce into a defiant, uncompromising existential condemnation that puts to shame Christian and Islamic pretensions.

To see how that’s so, I’ll take you through some highlights from Ecclesiastes, before turning to the insufficiency of the likely Christian and Muslim responses.

The Protomodern Jadedness of Ecclesiastes

The main point of Ecclesiastes is that everything in life is meaningless, so the best we can do is to enjoy the little pleasures we have at work and with our loved ones in our meager time before death.

Indeed, this is likely the very last line of the book, ‘“Meaningless! Meaningless!” says the Teacher.’ “Everything is meaningless!” (12:8), before the harmonizing epilogue about the need to keep God’s commandments, which was added by a later redactor. Ecclesiastes repeats the gist of that harsh judgment throughout its chapters, and note how that conclusion is reminiscent of the haunting line, “The horror, the horror!” from the movie “Apocalypse Now.”

The Hebrew word translated here as “meaningless” is “hebel,” meaning “breath” or “vapor,” which was used as a metaphor for what’s empty, insubstantial, vain, futile, fleeting, and deluded. The emphasis on this sense of “hebel” makes Ecclesiastes a forerunner of existentialist thought since existentialists like Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre are likewise known for declaring that life is absurd.

Indeed, the reason given for this emptiness of life is the same as in modern existentialism, namely the universality of death. Chapter 9:2–3 expounds on this theme:

All share a common destiny — the righteous and the wicked, the good and the bad, the clean and the unclean, those who offer sacrifices and those who do not. As it is with the good, so with the sinful; as it is with those who take oaths, so with those who are afraid to take them. This is the evil in everything that happens under the sun: The same destiny overtakes all. The hearts of people, moreover, are full of evil and there is madness in their hearts while they live, and afterward they join the dead.

Then come the famous lines: “I have seen something else under the sun: The race is not to the swift or the battle to the strong, nor does food come to the wise or wealth to the brilliant or favor to the learned; but time and chance happen to them all” (9:11).

Moreover, there’s skepticism about the afterlife: “the righteous and the wise and what they do are in God’s hands, but no one knows whether love or hate awaits them” (9:1). This same skepticism emerges again in perhaps the most astonishing passage in the book, which borders on all-out nihilism or on Arthur Schopenhauer’s pessimism, in 3:18–21:

I also said to myself, “As for humans, God tests them so that they may see that they are like the animals. Surely the fate of human beings is like that of the animals; the same fate awaits them both: As one dies, so dies the other. All have the same breath; humans have no advantage over animals. Everything is meaningless. All go to the same place; all come from dust, and to dust all return. Who knows if the human spirit rises upward and if the spirit of the animal goes down into the earth?”

This pessimism doesn’t shy away from the antinatalist sentiment: “But better than both is the one who has never been born, who has not seen the evil that is done under the sun” (4:3).

Another of the book’s themes is that all these pointless, vain efforts happen “under the sun,” the sun perhaps being a metaphor for God. For while Ecclesiastes focusses on condemning people for their follies, every such criticism is indirectly a criticism of God, our maker. If the creatures’ life is absurd, what does that say about the intentions or the competence of their creator? We toil “under the sun,” meaning that we’re subject to an apparently monstrous God whom Ecclesiastes says we should fear out of prudence or a survival instinct so as not to waste our limited time.

See, for example 3:14: “I know that everything God does will endure forever; nothing can be added to it and nothing taken from it. God does it so that people will fear him.” Or 5:7: “Much dreaming and many words are meaningless. Therefore fear God.”

Nor is the condemnation of God only indirect via the condemnation of his wicked or foolish creatures. Ecclesiastes attributes these vanities and absurdities to God rather than only to human freewill, contrary to the priestly practice of preserving God’s dignity: “What a heavy burden God has laid on mankind! I have seen all the things that are done under the sun; all of them are meaningless, a chasing after the wind. What is crooked cannot be straightened; what is lacking cannot be counted” (1:13–15). And again, “Consider what God has done: Who can straighten what he has made crooked?” (7:13).

But Ecclesiastes isn’t nihilistic, nor does the book infer atheism or God’s monstrousness. God’s ways are beyond our comprehension. What we can know is that the universality of death indicates God’s amorality and thus the wrongheadedness of the more popular religious messages. But God gives us some respite from the absurdity and from the strangeness of his absence, as in 5:18–20:

This is what I have observed to be good: that it is appropriate for a person to eat, to drink and to find satisfaction in their toilsome labor under the sun during the few days of life God has given them — for this is their lot. Moreover, when God gives someone wealth and possessions, and the ability to enjoy them, to accept their lot and be happy in their toil — this is a gift of God. They seldom reflect on the days of their life, because God keeps them occupied with gladness of heart.

Ecclesiastes repeats this hedonistic advice several times, such as in 8:14–15:

There is something else meaningless that occurs on earth: the righteous who get what the wicked deserve, and the wicked who get what the righteous deserve. This too, I say, is meaningless. So I commend the enjoyment of life, because there is nothing better for a person under the sun than to eat and drink and be glad. Then joy will accompany them in their toil all the days of the life God has given them under the sun.

Again, the point is there’s little justice in the world. Chance determines our fates, death awaits us all no matter what we’ve done, and no one knows about an afterlife. Thus, we should enjoy what we can while we’re certain of its possibility.

The reason Ecclesiastes finds some comfort in the little pleasures rather than, say, in knowledge is that wisdom, too, is futile: “I applied myself to the understanding of wisdom, and also of madness and folly, but I learned that this, too, is a chasing after the wind. For with much wisdom comes much sorrow; the more knowledge, the more grief” (1:17–18).

Technically, says the author of Ecclesiastes, wisdom is better than folly: “The quiet words of the wise are more to be heeded than the shouts of a ruler of fools” (9:17). But the problem is that the foolish often rule over the wise, as in this anecdote in 9:14–16:

There was once a small city with only a few people in it. And a powerful king came against it, surrounded it and built huge siege works against it. Now there lived in that city a man poor but wise, and he saved the city by his wisdom. But nobody remembered that poor man. So I said, “Wisdom is better than strength.” But the poor man’s wisdom is despised, and his words are no longer heeded.

Thus, “Wisdom is better than weapons of war, but one sinner destroys much good,” and “As dead flies give perfume a bad smell, so a little folly outweighs wisdom and honor” (9:18, 10:1).

The Improbability of Christian Revelation

Plainly, the first miracle is that this book found its way into a set of religious texts that emphasizes not just the fear of God but the love of him, and the need to show gratitude for his commandments and for his protection, wisdom, and mercy. Ecclesiastes implies there’s no trustworthy religious revelation, no handy manual that reassures us that our life has profound meaning. God’s will is unknown, and that leaves us in the dark.

The upshot, then, isn’t that we can trust Ecclesiastes because it’s in the Bible, but that Ecclesiastes sums up philosophical reflections from all around the world, which make for the subversive, sometimes heretical, esoteric religious traditions that compete with the more politically useful, exoteric creeds and temples.

How, then, could Christians and Muslims pontificate about our loftier, more pious obligations, to worship Jesus or to submit to Allah and obey not our natural talents but church hierarchies and elaborate religious codes or rituals of sacrifice, when Ecclesiastes implicitly skewers such sentiments? More importantly, how could all the religious persecutions and wars have proceeded in the Abrahamic (Judeo-Christian-Islamic) family, when Ecclesiastes was at the head of that family, in the Jewish canon?

The answer, of course, is that Christians and Muslims maintain that they were handed reliable religious revelations that override pessimistic philosophy.

Christians will say that God showed up in the form of Jesus and sacrificed himself on our behalf, showing us what he expects of us and what his character is like. God is no longer an ominous unknown source of the world’s absurdity; rather, he’s a wise, loving, self-sacrificing father figure. Mercy prevailed in Jesus’s first coming, and justice will prevail in his next one.

The question raised by Ecclesiastes, though, is whether we should expect the creator who would evidently have sustained the natural world as it’s been philosophically described, in all its horror and absurdity, to suddenly turn out to be like saintly Jesus. Why would God leave us in the dark for so long only to descend one day in incarnated form and “ascend” or disappear just as promptly, leaving later generations with reasonable doubts about the New testament’s veracity?

Behold again the onslaught of Ecclesiastes’ jadedness, in 1:3–11 (with my emphasis):

What do people gain from all their labors at which they toil under the sun? Generations come and generations go, but the earth remains forever…All things are wearisome, more than one can say. The eye never has enough of seeing, nor the ear its fill of hearing. What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun…No one remembers the former generations, and even those yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow them.

We have some early Christian documents, but they’ve been tampered with by pious redactors. Moreover, the New Testament was used to promote a version of Judaism that came to be called “Christianity” and that made its peace with the very Roman Empire that had slaughtered Jews, including Jesus, and had destroyed Jerusalem, the Jewish homeland, in the first century CE.

Couldn’t this be interpreted as only another form of vanity and absurdity under the sun, another ironic, chance-ridden reversal of fortune, bearing no discernable oversight by a righteous deity? Aren’t we left with Ecclesiastes’ world-weary skepticism about the likelihood of Christianity’s announcement, especially after two millennia have passed without a second coming of Jesus; there have been no firsthand reports of Jesus’ sayings or deeds (contrary to the Church’s fraudulent attributions of the gospels’ authorship); and the disciples’ alleged memories have been long since forgotten?

Western Christian theology blames us for everything. God is so great that he’s willing to overlook our original sin and corruption and to offer us a shortcut out of Hell. The shortcut features a sacrificial rigmarole — God as the victim and receiver of the sacrifice — that’s so absurd, Tertullian turned its very absurdity into a selling point or a test of faith-as-gullibility. “I believe it because it’s absurd,” he said.

The Eastern Church interpreted Jesus’s death and resurrection more as a model or a metaphor of our potential deification or atonement (at-onement) with God. Gnostic Christians said the point was that we, too, can be reborn, not with mere faith in a savior but by saving ourselves with the special knowledge passed on by esoteric Christians or included as the deeper meaning of Jesus’s life and parables.

Of course, Ecclesiastes’ response to the latter, more perennial spirituality is that it’s dubious compared to our plainer continuity with the animals we hunt, eat, and enslave. We may imagine we’re secret gods, but we evidently die like all the other animals. Instead of miraculous shortcuts, there’s a plethora of religious and political frauds to ensnare fools.

Also, isn’t it more likely that there was no such divine incarnation in Jesus and that a rebellious Jewish spiritual leader or perhaps just the oppressed Jewish people as a collective were immortalized with the Jesus character from Mark’s narrative that sparked the imitators, which snowballed into a syncretic religion? Didn’t Christianity triumph only because the Roman Empire happened to collapse in that formative period, leaving a power vacuum for other theocratic systems to fill, including Manichaeism?

Christianity might have lingered through the centuries as proof not of God’s presence or planning, but of human blindness and desperation. Christian churches exploit people’s gullibility, promising rewards in the afterlife if they obey not just God but the church leaders. Christianity became a business.

Thus, isn’t it all too easy to dismiss Christianity, based on Ecclesiastian doubt and realism?

Islam and Submission to Nature

Islamic revelation is like the Christian kind. The prophet Muhammad supposedly received his message from an angel of almighty God in the early seventh century, and his followers spread this message far and wide with military conquests. Apparently, the incarnation of Jesus wasn’t enough — as Ecclesiastes would have predicted. People forget the wisdom that was offered in earlier centuries, and the fools and sinners prosper at the expense of their intellectual and moral superiors. Allah, then, spoke once more through an intermediary, launching yet another monotheistic cycle.

Muslims are interested in a different kind of sacrifice, though, not in the sacrificial death of God’s Son, but in our submission to God’s greatness and to the words of his prophet Muhammad. We ought to follow the Islamic code of Sharia out of fear of displeasing our creator and of meriting everlasting punishment in Hell.

By contrast, Ecclesiastes says we should submit to the plain facts, not to any farfetched religious revelation. Attend to how nature works as we perceive it with our senses and as we can rationally understand it. Don’t fall for religious or metaphysical speculations about miracles and ultimate causes, but live simply as the clever animals we are. Submit to life’s cosmic absurdity, to God’s apparent absence and irrelevance, not to rumors of a conversation with a heavenly messenger. Submit to the needs of your body and make use of your talents while you have them. Be foolish and happy when you’re young and wise and sorrowful when you’re old, as recommended in the last two chapters of Ecclesiastes.

The Muslim’s submission is a matter of brutal domination. We’re to submit to God’s plan because of the terror whipped up by the Quran and by Muhammad’s conquering army, the later Middle Eastern dictators, and by the militant jihadists and medieval Arabs and Africans (Boko Haram, Hamas, Al-Qaeda, ISIL) that still terrorize Muslims and infidels alike.

Can you hear yet in your mind Ecclesiastes’ response to this fear-based enslavement? Whence all this evil, suffering, and foolish vanity? From the predominance not of Yahweh, Jesus, or Allah, contrary to the fanciful myths, but of the world as we find it, of the godless, inhuman natural world that uses our entire species as a mere steppingstone to reach some further pointless evolution of organic forms.

Why invent fantastic dominators in the sky when these are made superfluous by the natural world’s mindlessness? Why pretend you’re submitting to a supernatural master when we’re obviously all subservient to the sun, the seasons, the earth, water, air, our bodies, natural selection, and the physical forces and constants that shaped the universe and allowed for the emergence of vain, hapless, longsuffering creatures?

All hail the miracles of Ecclesiastes!