The Only Wise Pursuit: Wisdom from Ecclesiastes

David Saxon

Over the last ten years, I’ve had the privilege of teaching a course that covers Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, devoting the last third of the semester to the latter book. Students enjoy the practicality and diversity of Proverbs, touching as it does on a multitude of everyday issues and giving helpful direction in living life from the divine point of view. As we begin to cover Ecclesiastes, the contrast with Proverbs is striking. The thesis of the book, which the preacher (Qohelet) wraps around his entire argument (1:2; 12:8), is that everything in life is “vanity,” a word that indicates futility, emptiness, meaninglessness, absurdity, and transitoriness. Qohelet, who was most likely Solomon, then pursues this theme relentlessly, using the word “vanity” thirty-eight times and employing other metaphors, such as “chasing the wind” and unprofitability.

A few weeks into the study, students begin to feel the weight of Qohelet’s argument, and, invariably, someone will voice the mood of the class and ask if life is really supposed to be this depressing. At the end of the course, the students submit a short essay on the theme of the book, and a surprising trend appears in the essays. Many of the students comment that they thought the book was pessimistic until they really grasped Qohelet’s purpose. Then they realized that the wisdom of Ecclesiastes dovetails with that of Proverbs and has a message that is actually quite encouraging. What is that encouraging message embedded in an ancient essay designed to show the utter futility of everything done “under the sun”? Consider a metaphor: if I needed to cut down a tree and someone gave me a chainsaw, it would be very helpful to be told that hitting the tree with the chainsaw for hours would be utterly futile. That’s not the way the chainsaw is designed to work. Being told how it’s supposed to work would be enormously helpful, and that is what Ecclesiastes sets out to do relative to this rather important thing of living life. There is only one wise pursuit, and Ecclesiastes helps us find out what it is.