Ecclesiastes Chapter Two, Questioning Wisdom's Value

Ecclesiastes 2:15 So I said in my heart, “As it happens to the fool, it also happens to me, and why was I then more wise?” Then I said in my heart, “This also is vanity.” [16] For there is no more remembrance of the wise than of the fool forever, since all that now is will be forgotten in the days to come. And how does a wise man die? As the fool!

The preacher refers to himself in the first person here, contrasting his mental acumen to that of the infamous fool. He was wise; other men were fools. Yet both wise and foolish perish. The foolish lived, well, foolishly. But it did not benefit them, or hinder them, any more than the wise man who practiced his wisdom and walked with his eyes in his head.

This notion clearly galls the preacher, who now begins to wonder aloud if wisdom truly is the better path over foolishness, which leads to vanity. But more than wisdom which leads to honor or foolishness which leads to vanity, there is the mutually shared path: the human road that results in death. Wisdom does not preserve the wise man, just as folly does not condemn the fool. Whether wise or foolish, both perish, and wisdom’s fundamental value is suddenly brought into scrutiny by the man formerly extolling its virtue.

Reflecting on the virtue of how one lives inevitably brought the preacher to the end of life, and young or old, death is the great leveler. The fool dies in the same manner as the wise, which the preacher finds to be unbearably galling. Mind you, he is not referring to what becomes of man after death, or the state of man’s soul, be he fool or wise. No, this entire letter is about life under the sun, and how to reap the greatest benefit from living it. But the cold reality of life’s end rears its head here with an awful finality and the preacher can’t help but angrily comment. His wisdom is rendered impotent by it.

An example of both wise and fool meeting their end could go like this: the wise man, knowing the debilitating effects of alcohol refrains from drinking before driving home because he knows that his odds of reaching his house are higher if he’s sober. Another man with no such compunctions or scruples is highly inebriated when he gets behind the wheel and feels confident he’ll make it home, because he drives so much better drunk. One man’s poor choice negates the other’s wisdom, and both die in a car crash; the same event overtakes them both, and victim or perpetrator, both die in the same manner.

When Adam fell through transgression, the entire race (which Adam represented) fell in him. All were born sinners after Adam, beginning with Cain. Though Abel and Seth stood amongst the redeemed, they too would suffer death for being in the flesh and inheriting Adam’s curse. In fact, Abel and Cain represent my hypothetical situation nicely. Abel tried to speak reason with Cain, only for Cain in his folly to kill his own brother. Death is the ultimate end for man in this life, and the preacher laments that he will meet his end just like the proverbial fool.

The preacher further laments that even the memory of the wise will perish as the fool’s does. His contemporary life will be swallowed up in time and largely forgotten by future generations, who will be freed from pondering the lessons of their forebears and making plenty of their own errors, thinking their trials and issues unique to their generation. One might argue that the preacher is incorrect and we recall the past. In fact, aren’t we doing so right now as we reflect on what the preacher endeavors to relate? Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it, etc.?

If we truly remembered the wise, the lesson of their wisdom would impact future generations and collectively we would learn from the mistakes made by former generations. Yet the cyclical nature of life goes on. Man repeats the mistakes of the past, while attributing to the past the monumental spiritual ignorance we are currently steeped in. There is a term, ethnocentrism, that explains how one’s current culture is used to assess other cultures, both their standards and customs. The derogatory nature of ethnocentrism indicates that we aren’t looking for answers from other cultures, but rather to supply the lack other cultures suffer from, out of the wellspring of the current cultural milieu. When one looks to foreign cultures with such a viewpoint, we cannot gain anything from insights gleaned. The wise men of their times, even the finest of them, were also prisoners of a backward and ignorant era and it sullies their wisdom by casting a dubious light on how ennobled or enlightened such primitives could be. This type of thinking doesn’t even leave our Lord Jesus Christ safe, as many professing Christians view Jesus’ worldview as that of a man of His time.

The end of the passage may actually be a clever play on words, comparing the wise and the fool at death. The wise dies a fool, he may be saying as a tongue in cheek jest of the bitterest sort, since his wisdom does not deliver him from the grave, therefore what value was wisdom when the wise man needed it most? He might as well have been a fool, since he died in like fashion.