Ecclesiastes Chapter One, Rise & Fall

Ecclesiastes 1:5 The sun also rises, and the sun goes down, and hastens to the place where it arose.

The book of Ecclesiastes is found in the Tanakh, the Jewish Bible, in the collection of the writings, or the Kethuvim. To be specific, the Jewish Bible is comprised of the Torah, the Prophets, and the Writings. Amongst the writings may be found poetic narratives such as the Psalms, Song of Songs, or Lamentations. There are also historical writings in the form of Ruth, Ezra, Nehemiah and 1 and 2 Chronicles. 1 Chronicles in the Tanakh is the book of 1 and 2 Kings in the Christian Bible.

The point I am attempting to convey is actually two fold. First: the narrative in Ecclesiastes is poetic in its form. Verse 4 defined the rising of a generation, supplanting the one that preceded it, contrasted to the sun overhead that waxes and wanes, rushing to do again what it has done so many times before. Second, the phrase “under the sun,” is very necessary for context when considering what the preacher is saying. From a human perspective, or under the sun, we stand on the face of the earth and watch the sun rotate around the planet. It rises and it sets, and everyone accepts this as the norm; it is an entirely normative descriptor, used even today.

What is interesting here is the language employed. The sun rises, crosses the sky in its arc and goes down, the preacher tells us, before hastening back to its starting point, so to speak, to begin the day anew. The Tanakh states that that the sun “glides back to where it rises.” If the sun crosses the sky in a circular arc, then it may be safely assumed it passes under our feet in similar fashion, intimating the round, or globe shape of the earth that receives its light. The sun was created to govern the day, and to separate day and night so mankind could measure time’s passage, Genesis 1:14-18.

The sun (and the moon) were created by God expressly for light, to divide the day from the night with each governing orb representing which portion of the day it was. They were also created for, “signs and seasons, and for days and years,” Genesis 1:14. The majesty of the celestial bodies was for the express purpose of giving mankind an atomic clock of epic proportion by which to mark time’s passage: something incredibly helpful in a world where time’s march ages and ultimately kills all material creation. For those that believe this verse merely demonstrates Solomon’s lack of understanding of the earth’s true shape and position in space, we read in Proverbs that he says of the earth: “He drew a circle on the face of the deep,” Proverbs 8:27. Isaiah adds, “It is He who sits above the circle of the earth,” Isaiah 40:22. Job, when debating with his supposed comforters, said, “He stretches out the north over empty space; He hangs the earth on nothing,” Job 26:7. Isaiah lived in the eighth century BC. Solomon lived around 970 BC. Job is believed by many biblical scholars to be a contemporary of Abraham dating back to 2000 BC. Yet Solomon and Isaiah ascribe to the earth a round shape, while Job states the planet is suspended in space, upon nothingness. The concept of a flat earth is not preached in Scripture, nor is this present verse evidence to the contrary when left to speak for itself in the context of its book.

The language is indicative of poetic flourish to accentuate a point. The phraseology is hardly archaic, since it is still employed today, along with other idioms found in Scripture such as the four corners of the earth. The same phrase is employed in Malachi, where we read, “For from the rising of the sun, even to its going down, My name shall be great among the Gentiles,” Malachi 1:11. From a terrestrial perspective this saying makes sense to the hearer. It can be indicative of the concept of time’s endless flow, like a rolling wheel that just goes on and on heedlessly, oblivious of what occurs on the surface of planet earth. The preacher wants his readership to consider that one generation rises to supplant the former just as the sun sinks and rises again after the night is spent. This topic, of human succession and the grief it can cause the elder generation, is one the preacher will visit again more than once before his sermon concludes.