Joy at the End of the Tether: The Inscrutable Wisdom of Ecclesiastes

by Douglas Wilson

The man who says he has found something new is being something old. As sure as the sun rises, men will continue to make the same mistake except for those to whom God gives wisdom. Every morning folly comes up over the horizon. Again. Morning, sunshine. Time to put the coffee on. Again. To be wise, a man must know his limitations. “All things are full of labour; man cannot utter it” (v. 8). A wise believer is a man who knows the length of his tether. Only through the wisdom which God gives can he come to enjoy this limitation, this restriction, this vanity. And while a wise man may come to enjoy this vanity, even he cannot really express it. 1. If the book of Ecclesiastes presented vanity to mean utter and ultimate absurdity, then it would have had much less argumentation in it and more references to buttered toast, rainbow trout, along with veiled prophecies of attempts at poetry by Walt Whitman. This would be far more consistent with the “absurdity worldview,” which would, of course, make it inconsistent. 2. I am greatly indebted to Walter Kaiser for this procedure and for his treatment of the translation issues in Ecclesiastes 2:24–26. See his small but very fine commentary on Ecclesiastes (Walter Kaiser, Ecclesiastes: Total Life [Chicago: Moody Press, 1979], 43–45).