I'm a great admirer of Lloyd Geering. He has held very clear ideas for many decades, and expressed them with clarity and courage. This book is a further example of his expression of them. The Bible did not fall from heaven, it has a long and complex history of authorship and of compilation. Nonetheless it contains insights and wisdom which have been highly valued and still inspire us today.
When I was at Theological College – a very earnest young man – I felt ambivalent about Ecclesiastes.
Cynicism and pessimism were not what I expected in the Bible. Yet it was very beautiful, and it was this which eventually endeared it to me. The book contains an honest, no-nonsense, unafraid approach to the facts of human living. With the author Qoheleth we face unpleasant truths and unsettling doubts without panic.
Such is life!
This is what Lloyd Geering picks up in his book of that title, calling Ecclesiastes 'the heretical book'. It seems totally to ignore earlier Hebrew writings – the Torah, the historical books and the Prophets – with their great themes of Exodus, Exile and Return. But it has much in common with 'Wisdom literature'. Had Qoheleth (the Preacher) read the Book of Job? or Proverbs? or indeed the Psalms? And was Qoheleth serious about claiming to be 'son of David, King in Jerusalem'? Lloyd explores these and many other questions through a 20th Century device – a Close Encounter of the Third (or some other) Kind. An inventive idea, but I think it has serious snags.
Part 1 of Lloyd's book is – as usual – a good read: clear, accessible, radical in its thinking. Excellent scholarship and a powerful message: what we make of life must arise from our experience and the evidence of our senses, illuminated by, but never reliant on, what other people have done, said or written.
Qoheleth writes 'I studied all human activities, everything that happens to people on the face of the earth' (Ecclesiastes 1: 13 – Lloyd's translation 'into the English language and secular culture of the 21st Century C.E'). So we are introduced to the method of dialogue in which Lloyd will have a 'close encounter with Ecclesiastes'. Lloyd writes (page 32): 'These dialogues are of necessity very one-sided, for Ecclesiastes has only very limited opportunity to question me.' He's right. I must have instinctively identified with Qoheleth. I found myself getting more and more irritated by this man who persisted in calling me 'Ecclesiastes' (a 'churchy' word I'd never heard before), altered my poetic 'under the sun' to the prosaic 'in this world', repeatedly told me what I had 'really meant to say', and bored me with lots of philosophical and scientific jargon. And he kept on talking to his 21st Century readers in the middle of talking to me. He wasn't really listening to me at all.
While I was taking Qoheleth's side and ploughing reluctantly through the dialogue, I turned for relief to the last chapter of Lloyd's book, entitled 'Afterword'. I was reassured as I read about the Axial Period (towards the end of which Qoheleth wrote), and an assessment of Qoheleth's pessimism within the global context of that time. Everything was changing, the old certainties were collapsing, new questions were taking their place. Are we now in a second 'Axial Period'? Is that why Qoheleth's words seem so apposite today?
Reading that last chapter about the historical development of ideas encouraged me to go back to the dialogue, and I found a lot to learn both from Qoheleth and from Lloyd – about meaninglessness and the search for meaning, and how modern attitudes such as existentialism might be prefigured way back in the 3rd Century BCE. 'Ecclesiastes displayed a remarkable number of the traits of today's secular person; it is tempting to say that it has taken us twenty-three centuries to catch up with where he was, ' says Lloyd (page 204).
I would have liked to feel more of the poetic depth of Qoheleth's metaphors, less overlaid with the preoccupations and fashions of today's thinking, but in general the book succeeds in challenging us to face questions concerning the meaning and purpose of our existence, and to avoid easy answers. 'The words of the wise are like goads. They are like nails driven firmly home.' (Ecclesiastes 12:11 in Lloyd's translation)
Such is Life by Lloyd Geering, Polebridge Press (Salem, USA 2010). Pbk. 213 pages. £17.05.