1Send out your bread upon the waters, for in the long course of time you will find it. 2Give a share to seven and even to eight, for you know not what evil will be on earth. 3If the clouds fill, they will empty out rain on the earth. And if a tree falls in the south or the north, the place where the tree falls, there it will be. 4He who watches the wind will not plant, and who gazes on clouds will not harvest. 5As you know not the path of the life-breath into the limbs within the full womb, so you know not the deeds of God, Who does everything. 6In the morning plant your seed and at evening let your hand not rest, for you know not which will be fit, this one or that, or whether both be equally good. 7And light is sweet, and it is good for the eyes to see the sun. 8Should a man live many years, let him rejoice in all of them, and let him recall the days of darkness, for they will be many. Whatever comes is mere breath. 9Rejoice, young man, in your youth, and let your heart be merry in the days of your prime, and go about in the ways of your heart and what your eyes see. But know that for all these God will bring you to judgment. 10And remove worry from your heart, and take evil away from your flesh, for youth and the time of vigor are mere breath.
CHAPTER 11 NOTES
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1. Send out your bread upon the waters. These words initiate a series of prudential maxims on how to conduct one’s life in the face of the unpredictability of events and their deterministic character that is beyond human control. The sending out of bread on the waters is surely not advice about overseas investments, as some commentators have imagined, but rather a didactic metaphor. The proposal of Rashi, Abraham ibn Ezra, and other medieval commentators that the reference is to acts of charity is perfectly plausible: perform acts of beneficence, for you never know when you yourself may benefit from having done them. The idea is then continued in the next verse: be generous to any number of people, for in the course of events you yourself may end up in need and enjoy a reciprocation of support from one of those you have helped.
3. If the clouds fill. The sense of this entire verse is that there is a system of strict causation in the structure of things, even though the second sentence puts this in terms that verge on tautology.
if a tree falls. This image conveys a sense of events occurring with an inevitability that, like trees in the forest, is not controlled by man.
4. He who watches the wind . . . who gazes on clouds. The good agriculturalist does not waste his time looking for signs of changing weather before he acts but plants at the fixed season (“a time to plant”) in the expectation of an eventual harvest.
5. into the limbs within the full womb. The “limbs,” ʿatsamim, are the body of the fetus. The Masoretic Text reads “like the limbs,” kaʿatsamim, but many Hebrew manuscripts as well as the Targum have, more plausibly, baʿatsamim, “into the limbs.” The received text also reads “the womb of the full one [that is, the pregnant woman],” which could be correct, but a change of the initial vowel from be to ba yields “the full womb” and enables the translation to reproduce the play on “fill” in verse 3. This may be the more likely reading because there are no other biblical instances of “the full one” as a synonym for a pregnant woman.
6. for you know not which will be fit. This is more prudential advice. Qohelet recommends that, given the uncertainty of future events, one would do well to diversify one’s investments, figuratively and perhaps literally.
7–8. light is sweet . . . recall the days of darkness. These moving words are another exhortation by Qohelet to enjoy the good things of this fleeting life while we still have it. As Nabokov movingly puts it in the opening sentence of Speak, Memory, “common sense tells us that our existence is but a crack between two eternities of darkness.”
8. Whatever comes is mere breath. It is unlikely that this refers to death, as some have claimed, because in Qohelet it is darkness that is associated with death, whereas “mere breath” is rather the futile substance of worldly experience. Whatever happens, then, in our lives is mere breath—fleeting, insubstantial, without meaning—and all we can do is to take pleasure in what seems pleasurable.
9. for all these God will bring you to judgment. It is tempting to follow the suggestion of many commentators who see this whole sentence as an editorial intrusion, perhaps from the same hand that was responsible for the epilogue of the book. It must be said, though, that Qohelet does sometimes entertain the idea of a God who judges every human creature, even if at other points “God” in his usage is close to “fate.”
10. take evil away from your flesh. “Evil” here does not carry a moral sense but means something like “harm,” “unpleasantness.”
the time of vigor. As a long exegetical condition assumes, the term shaḥarut probably derives from shaḥor, “black”—that is, the time of life when the hair is still black. (Others connect the word with shaḥar, “dawn,” though the dawn of life would be infancy, not youth.) This moment is evanescent, mere breath, for the gray hair and its attendant infirmities will soon come.