1And recall your Creator in the days of your prime, until the days of evil come, and the years arrive, when you will say, “I have no delight in them.” 2Until the sun goes dark, and the light and the moon and the stars, and the clouds come back after the rain.
3On the day that the guards of the house will quake
and the stalwart men be twisted,
and the maids who grind grow idle, for they are now few,
and those who look from the casements go dark.
4And the double doors close in the market
as the sound of the mill sinks down,
and the sound of the bird arises,
and all the songstresses are bowed.
5Of the very height they are afraid,
and terror is in the road.
and the locust tree is laden,
and the caper fruit falls apart.
For man is going to his everlasting house,
and the mourners turn round in the market.
6Until the silver cord is snapped,
and the golden bowl is smashed,
and the pitcher is broken against the well,
and the jug smashed at the pit.
7And dust returns to the earth as it was,
and the life-breath returns to God Who gave it.
8Merest breath, said Qohelet. All is mere breath.
9And more than being wise, Qohelet further taught knowledge to the people and weighed and searched out and framed many maxims. 10Qohelet sought to find apt words and wrote honestly words of truth. 11The words of the wise are like goads and like nails driven in—from the composers of collections, given from a certain shepherd. 12And more than these, my son, beware: of making many books there is no end, and much chatter is a weariness of the flesh. 13The last word, all being heard: fear God and keep His commands, for that is all humankind. 14Since every deed will God bring to judgment, for every hidden act, be it good or evil.
CHAPTER 12 NOTES
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1. in the days of your prime. The stress on the evanescence of the years of vigor before decrepitude and death continues the theme of the last four verses of the previous chapter.
the days of evil. Again, the sense of “evil” is not moral but physical—when the body begins to fall apart.
2. the clouds come back after the rain. This seeming reversal of the order of nature is an indication of the personal catastrophe of aging: everything goes dark, and in this ultimate storm, the clouds continue to blanket the sky even after the rain—perhaps because (verse 3) the sense of sight is dimmed. As many commentators have noted, there is an affinity between the imagery here and some of the apocalyptic imagery of the Prophets.
3. On the day that the guards of the house will quake. The book of Qohelet proper aptly concludes with this haunting—and also mystifying—poem on the waning of human life and on impending death. The poem abounds in textual difficulties, and some of the references are ambiguous or simply unclear. A tradition of interpretation that goes back to Late Antiquity reads the poem as an allegory of the deterioration of the body, but as Fox and others have argued, the allegory, plausible for some of the images, breaks down elsewhere. The literal picture of a house, or an estate, in decay is eloquent in itself, and rituals of mourning are clearly enacted outside the house. At best, one may say that certain lines, but not others, also invite comparisons with parts of the aging body.
the maids who grind grow idle. Grinding grain with a hand mill would have been the work of female servants in an affluent ancient Near Eastern household. But the Hebrew feminine plural toḥanot could also suggest teeth (mostly fallen out here), and in later Hebrew it is in fact the word for molars.
those who look from the casements. The corresponding body part would be the eyes, feminine plural in Hebrew like this verb.
4. the sound of the bird arises. The Hebrew phrasing is obscure and has generated highly divergent interpretations. One possible understanding is that in the silence that falls as the maids cease their labor of grinding, the sound of a solitary bird—no cheerful songbird—stands out, and the songstresses on their part fall silent and are bowed low. The literal sense of “songstresses” is “daughters of song,” which has led some to construe the phrase as a reference to birds, but that would create a contradiction with the singular “sound of the bird.”
5. Of the very height they are afraid. The meaning of the Hebrew has been much debated. It is unclear whether “they” refers to old people or to the songstresses, but the idea seems to be that they are afraid in all directions, above and below.
almond . . . / locust . . . / caper-fruit. The allegorizers have exercised strenuous ingenuity on these lines (the almond blossom corresponding to white hair, the sagging locust to an impotent penis, and so forth). It is less strained to read these lines simply as images of the cycle of growth and decay in nature as man is about to depart from that cycle. The most puzzling reference is to the laden locust. Some see this as indicating a plant, not an insect (in fact a meaning carried by the English word as well); others detect a reference to the female locust heavy with eggs, after laying which she dies. Perhaps the least strained construction is a locust tree heavy with ripe fruit.
the mourners turn round. Here at the end of the book, Qohelet invokes the same verb he used repeatedly at the beginning for the futile cycle of the natural world and then for his own turning about in quest of wisdom.
6. the silver cord . . . / the golden bowl. Again, without allegory, precious things fall apart, like human life.
the pitcher is broken . . . / the jug smashed. Seow points to archaeological evidence that pottery was actually broken at burial sites as a sign of mourning. Galgal, “jug,” elsewhere usually means “wheel,” but here it is evidently related to gulah, the word used for “bowl.” The sense of “wheel” remains a possibility.
pit. The Hebrew bor is a pit, sometimes a well, but also a term for the grave or the underworld.
8. Merest breath, said Qohelet. In a gesture of tight closure, Qohelet repeats precisely the refrain with which he began the book.
9. And more than being wise. The strong consensus of scholarship is that the verses from here to the end of the text are an epilogue added by an editor, with the aim of bringing Qohelet’s radical vision in line with more conventional piety. Many interpreters construe the initial word, yoter, as “furthermore,” but that strains Hebrew usage, which clearly attaches yoter to shehayah Qohelet, literally, “than Qohelet was.” The stated idea as it is understood in this translation is plausible: Qohelet was not merely a sage but, one might say, a lecturing and publishing sage, one who gave public instruction and edited and formulated maxims.
further. Others construe this as “constantly.”
weighed. This verb derives from the word for “ear,” ʾozen, but only here does it appear in the piʿel conjugation. Many understand it as “listen,” but listening seems too passive for the other activities of compiling and formulating listed here. The verb could easily be connected with the word for “scales,” mʾoznayim, as it is in later Hebrew, where it means “balance” or “weigh.”
11. goads . . . nails. The images suggest that the words of the wise may sting or hurt, which seems especially apt for Qohelet.
from the composers of collections. The meaning of the Hebrew is uncertain, but a reference to anthologists or collectors of sayings is plausible in context. Syntactically, there is an ellipsis here, the sense being “[the words of the wise] from the composers of collections.”
given from a certain shepherd. Traditionally, this highly obscure phrase is understood as a reference to God (“from one Shepherd”). Fox and Seow both argue convincingly that the simile of the goad leads to a reference to an actual goad-wielding shepherd, and that ʾeḥad, “one,” is used here as it is sometimes used elsewhere as what amounts to an indefinite article. Nevertheless, this phrase is oddly detached in the syntax from the goads and nails.
12. chatter. The Hebrew lahag refers either to speech or to study, and the parallelism with making many books has encouraged many interpreters to opt for “study.” But the author of the epilogue, at once praising Qohelet and interposing a certain distance from him, wants to warn readers that all this writing, including Qohelet’s, may simply exhaust one and perhaps distract one from the simple duties of piety, so the sense of “chatter” has some plausibility. This is the regular meaning of lahag in later Hebrew.
13. The last word. The author of the epilogue is at pains to have the last word, which will neutralize the many subversive words Qohelet has uttered.
for that is all humankind. Though the King James Version’s interpretive “this is the whole duty of man” may catch the intention of the original, that rendering makes the clause sound more strictly didactic than it is, and it seems better to preserve the slightly ambiguous inclusiveness of the Hebrew.
14. every deed will God bring to judgment. Qohelet, too, at a couple of points expresses the idea that we are subject to God’s judgment, but this monitory flourish at the very end is an affirmation of the staunch piety with which the epilogist seeks to contain the more disruptive ideas of Qohelet.