It has been 20 years or so since I last read the Bible. I can’t say I was particularly impressed by it at the time; the oft rambling, repetitious and contradictory mess that it is. But, today I am an older man — though not an ounce wiser — and the palpable presence of death looming at the end of every prostate exam goads me into the spiritual, or at least the pretense thereof.*
When looking at the Bible, there is perhaps no better book to start with than Ecclesiastes. No other book captures the spirit of life, nor better grounds us in the reality of our world. It begins with this:
“Meaningless! Meaningless! says the Teacher.
Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless.”
Ok, Bible, you have my attention.
In many versions you’ll see the word vanities used in place of meaningless, but after my extensive thirty minutes of research, I feel this NIV translation more adequately conveys the book’s sentiment. A sentiment which is repeated ad nauseam over all twelve meandering chapters, and which could be more wholly whittled down the something like:
At the end there’s a bit of “follow God’s commandments,” but some people think this was tacked on after the fact. It certainly seems out of place.
The question you’re probably asking yourself is whether this is truly a Biblical book of wisdom or did someone manage to slip an angsty teenager’s diary into the Old Testament?
This is a reasonable question, and I’m not entirely sure. Much like the Song of Songs, there were debates over whether the book of Ecclesiastes should have been cut from the canon. Thankfully, it was not, and future youth group leaders still have a way to connect with listless teenagers who were forced to go to the First Presbyterian Church every Wednesday from 6:00 pm to 8:00 pm to listen to hip college kids sing alt-rock Jesus songs while they play simplistic backbeats and chord progressions, when they could have been home firing up their 28.8k baud modem — that sweet static hum portending a three-hour post-homework session of Doom.
One thing you’ll notice if you read the book for yourself is it contradicts itself time and time again. It could be that the book is working out a philosophical argument through dialogue as it goes back and forth between these ideas:
Despite the elbow patches I have on my t-shirts, I am not a scholar, so I can’t weigh in on how valid this dialogue theory is, but I can tell you about the caperberry war (the term war here is a bit hyperbolic, I admit).
The word abiyyonah (אֲבִיּוֹנָה) pronounced abiyyonah, appears only in Ecclesiastes, and to this day we don’t really know what it refers to. Some say it’s the humble caper Capparis spinosa. The verse in question is 12:5, and not all translations will have it, instead substituting the word “desire”. Here is the Wycliffe Bible (WYC):
And high things shall dread, and shall be afeared in the way (And when they shall fear high places, and shall be afraid to go on the way, or to go out in public); and an almond tree shall flower, a locust shall be made fat, and (the) capers shall be destroyed; for a man shall go into the house of his everlastingness, and wailers shall go about in the street.
Yes, this is the same caper that some restaurants will throw on top of an overcooked slab of fish as garnish. In the ancient world it was reputed to be an aphrodisiac, though the more I read of history, almost everything back then was considered to be an aphrodisiac. What this caper means in Ecclesiastes could refer to a waning sexual prowess or the failing of one’s loins, so to speak.
Back to the war. In 1886, a man by the name of John E. Todd did a survey that he published in the Journal of the Society of Biblical Literature and Exegesis which made the case that the word should be desire and not caperberry. This had long been a point of contention in translation footnotes, lexicons and commentaries. For some reason, a lot of people care whether it’s caperberries or not. As for me, I’m fully on board with team caperberry. If you want, you can check out different translations here and see for yourself which are on the side of light and which have fallen to darkness.
To wrap this up, I enjoyed reading this book more than I thought, and as part of my quest to read (re-read, really) the entire Bible, I will revisit this book in the future and add more of my unqualified thoughts in an addendum below.
*All my posts are artisanal, and the em dash and semicolon are handcrafted by me, not an LLM.
