Ecclesiastes Chapter One, Circular Nature

Ecclesiastes 1:6 The wind goes toward the south, and turns around to the north; the wind whirls about continually, and comes again on its circuit. [7] All the rivers run into the sea, yet the sea is not full; to the place from which the rivers come, there they return again.

While these verses are not meant to specifically be scientifically accurate statements as we would construe such things in modernity, yet they do aptly describe the weather system and hydration. The winds the preacher refers to constitute a global circulation that does indeed form what the preacher referred to as a “circuit.” The hydrological cycle, discovered and proven in modern times, reveals that the rivers receive their hydration from oceanic evaporation, thus creating a cyclical nature of rainfall.

While this commentary is fascinating, ably describing systems that would not be scientifically understood for another nearly 3,000 years, again the preacher is using these concepts to illustrate a point. As a generation passes and another succeeds it, so too does the sun rise and set, the wind blow about in an endless circuit, and the water return from the ocean to the rivers that feed it. The writer employs poetic illustration to express a common point all share: the seemingly recycled and pointless nature of human succession. The writer clearly does not favor the ideology of forward progress, that mankind is improving as one generation takes over, more enlightened or ennobled than the previous.

Rather, we will learn in due time that the preacher sees no meaningful pattern in life under the sun, but rather that time and chance are the true engine that runs this chaotic scheme, Ecclesiastes 9:11. The preacher invokes a thoughtful and oddly modern perspective about the foibles of human existence. Though he subscribes to time and chance, it is clearly in the same category as folly and futility; there is a certain and clear pointlessness to patterns that repeat without achieving anything different. Life under the sun is vanity as it leads a new generation to experience for the first time what the generation prior already learned: that they must age and die, and leave behind their ephemeral legacies to those who may or may not care, and in turn be forgotten by the merciless march of time, sometimes brutally quickly when time’s partner, chance, rears its head.

Think about this pair of verses, ultimately describing the same adventure. The wind begins its course and crosses the world on its circuit; it globe trots and sees every corner the earth has, only to find itself right back where it began. Likewise the rain that runs into the rivers, descending ever onward until it contributes to the enormous totality of the ocean…until the ocean vomits it out and sends it back to the place of its origin. Man is likewise born and grows up, learns, gains, changes, until that final change known as death ends everything he is, does, and says. His gain comes to naught. His ambitions, wisdom and insights all prove fruitless because time doesn’t care if man has unfinished business. All the while as that generation declines, we see another youthful generation arise, inheriting all that was done and gained, forgetting that we were once that generation, too. From whence we came, namely from nothing before birth, so do we go, decomposing in the earth as our lifeless corpse symbolizes what our lives achieved: decaying out of sight and out of mind.

This type of bitter and even resentful innuendo is rife in this book as the preacher explores life under the sun and finds, quite literally, nothing to his liking. Life is evil, filled with labor, vain and hopeless. It lacks any kind of metanarrative to empower it, and objective reasons for existing fail to manifest. So like the sun, the wind, and the water that circulates over the surface of an abiding earth, mankind continues to mill over the world accomplishing something that only matters to himself, and fleetingly at that before death removes even the artificial semblance of purpose man could pretend to inject. More on this later, God willing.