Ecclesiastes Chapter Two, Changing Of The Guard

Ecclesiastes 2:12 Then I turned myself to consider wisdom and madness and folly; for what can the man do who succeeds the king?—only what he has already done.

The consideration of the preacher settles on a particular topic: his reign. The preacher was the wisest, richest, most powerful king in Jerusalem that ever was, and by God’s admission, would ever be, outside the of the Lord Jesus Christ. In verses 10 and 11 he contemplated materialism and hedonism, and how he did gain superficial pleasure or a sense of accomplishment when he reflected on what he had done.

But when he scrutinized his efforts in verse 11 his house of cards collapsed. Like that proverbial house of cards, the integrity of his efforts was very ephemeral, and it turned his accomplishment into a point of internal bitterness. He had toiled (his word) for vanity and grasping after the wind.

Having turned inward, the preacher reflected anew on wisdom, madness, and folly, again linking the three together in some macabre chain of logical progression. Human wisdom, or wisdom that is not God derived, can direct a man’s life in the course he determines, within some certain margin for error and the unexpected. This the preacher concedes later in this same book. But wisdom’s purpose is to better a man, by virtue of its existence. So then, the preacher, by reflecting on his first path, may be galled to know that wisdom has nothing to do with material accomplishment or intellectual pedigree. Wisdom has become madness, which defaults into folly, since the man that exercises such wisdom does not genuinely benefit from his endeavors. His endeavors mask real purpose; his efforts conceal the absence of an overarching narrative that ties the individual to ultimate reality and the race that he shares this reality with.

Inevitably, the preacher ponders about the nature of his successor. Who will this man be, and what will this man do? The preacher likely held the mental image of his own son and heir, Rehoboam, in his mind while he penned these lines. But his line of thought is not that narrow or short minded. No, he is looing ahead to Israel’s future and the throne of Jerusalem. He made the kingdom great and prospered so that silver was like stone and cedar trees mundane. Fellow potentates bowed to him and gave him gifts, which suggested that these men were peers in title, but recognized in this man a superiority native in him that they lacked. He was a leader of leaders, an image or shadow of the Christ to come who is Lord of lords, and King of kings.

He is bitter because he comes to the realization that the man who follows him will only do what the preacher himself already accomplished. And from his perspective, the preacher might have been duly concerned about the law of diminishing returns. If God already told Solomon that his kingship was the pinnacle (humanly speaking) that Israel would enjoy, a golden age blessed by godly wisdom and great gain, then the following man’s reign would be inferior. This was not unlike the burden Nebuchadnezzar must have labored under when Daniel informed the Babylonian king that his kingdom would suffer inferior successors and inevitably be swallowed by a future, eternal kingdom, Daniel 2:36-45. The cyclical progression, or rather stasis of human affairs as one generation looks back on the prior and declares itself superior while in fact committing the same feats and foibles was typified by the preacher’s successor: a man that would do only (and no more) than he himself had already done.