This essay argues that the oscillation running through Ecclesiastes – praised by some as literary paradox, dismissed by others as unresolved pessimism – is the phenomenological record of someone performing the crucifixion of opposites under a god-image that contains evil without the vocabulary to name what it contains. Qohelet is stranded between a polytheistic solution no longer available within the monotheistic tradition he was writing inside, and an individuation vocabulary not yet invented, which is why the text can only oscillate rather than resolve.

Welcome back. This is a post about Ecclesiastes, which is my favorite book of either the Old Testament or New Testament, including runner-up Job, another Old Testament “wisdom literature” which I have covered previously in relation to Jung’s mind-expanding book (pre-Abraxian shift) and more in a recent Note.

Before getting to Ecclesiastes, what I appreciate about Job is how it focuses on extreme injustice done to an innocent man with God’s approval, highlighting the nature of a God containing both good and evil. “He murders both the pure and the wicked… he laughs at the anguish of the innocent… who does it, if not he?” (9:22–24) Jung’s contribution in Answer to Job was to tie this to an evolving God image, where God grows his limited consciousness (because consciousness arises from subject/object differentiation which are otherwise united in the Godhood) through his interactions with humanity. To Jung, this both provides a theodicy – evil exists perhaps because God is to some degree unconscious – and provides dignity and meaning to humanity because it provides a cosmic role for our suffering. The book was written quickly after his near-fatal heart attack and under intense compulsion from his Self, and it served as a bridge for Jung between the privatio boni (God as all good, grafted onto Christianity by Augustine through a genealogy extending from Neoplatonism) and Abraxas (God as containing evil, articulated in his Liber Novus and which he backed away from as too psychologically destabilizing). My work by and large begins with accepting the horrifying conception of God-as-totality and following its implications.

Jung never covered Ecclesiastes in depth, which I find to be curious given the phenomenological weight it gives to the crucifixion of opposites (an expression Jung only mentions once or twice, discussed here). The individuation process so central to his work involves consciously holding the opposites without ego-resolution until a provisional answer arises as intuition, and holding the opposites is often quite painful. Furthermore, the alchemical process leading to the union of the opposites – the coincidentia oppositorum – which so interested Jung, to the point he created a detailed genealogy (extending from the ancient gnostics through the medieval alchemists to modern psychology) relies fundamentally on pairs of opposites as well. Yet he doesn’t focus on Ecclesiastes and neither do prominent Jungians from what I can tell – not Edinger, not Hillman, not Stein, not von Franz, etc. Why not?

My provisional answer is that Ecclesiastes’ focus on the crucifixion of opposites is non-redemptive and doesn’t have a narrative story to offer, unlike in Job. Jung could take the Job story and offer a redemptive story of the evolution of the God image through mankind’s suffering, offering readers hope, but in Ecclesiastes one holds the opposites, suffers, and there is no redemptive payoff. For someone focused on growing his practice and on meaning-making, something like Ecclesiastes could threaten his psychology practice by destabilizing patients and negatively affect the movement he was trying to build. In other words, Jung perhaps needed a redemptive narrative to offer patients, analysts, and other followers, while Ecclesiastes does not provide that. Furthermore, Ecclesiastes reads to me as primarily coherence-stabilized (observing reality and asking what results from that wherever it leads), so perhaps Jung – who I see as primarily status/esteem and meaning stabilized – had difficulty metabolizing the work. Still, I think his failure to discuss it was a mistake, because it is so powerful and so illuminating about the central concept of the opposites.1

The interpretive claim I intend to present here is that the oscillation in Ecclesiastes that has puzzled commentators from the rabbinic debates at Jamnia to Bartholomew’s careful modern analysis is not primarily a rhetorical device, not a symptom of unresolved pessimism, not a dialectic moving toward resolution; rather, it is the phenomenological record of someone performing the crucifixion of opposites under a god-image that contains evil but lacks the vocabulary to name what it contains. Each time Ecclesiastes/Qohelet (the “teacher”) finds a provisional foothold (wisdom is better than folly, enjoyment is a gift, companionship has value) he immediately tests it against the structural reality he has observed and finds it insufficient. Not false – the foothold is real – but it cannot hold the weight of a condition that admits no permanent resolution. The text is what the crucifixion of opposites feels like, documented somewhere between 400 and 250 BCE, and from this perspective available interpretive frameworks (orthodox Jewish, Christian, secular academic) misread it by requiring the oscillation to resolve in a redemptive direction it never takes. The Orthodox Jewish reader needs it to end in “fear God and keep the commandments.” The Christian reader needs it to end in Christ’s fulfillment. The secular pessimist reader needs it to be a cry of despair. The academic structuralist catalogs its polar opposites without asking what generates them. None of these readings sit still in the oscillation itself. The Abraxian framework does, because it has a name for the structural condition Qohelet is navigating without being able to name.

Prior frameworks for reading Ecclesiastes have produced sophisticated analyses of its formal features – Michael Fox’s work on contradiction, Loader’s structural catalog of polar opposites, Bartholomew’s observation that the juxtaposition of opposites leaves interpretive space for the reader.2 These are genuine contributions, but none of them supply an account of what generates the oscillation rather than merely describing its formal features. Describing the oscillation as paradox, as tension, as the “riddle of Qohelet,” names the phenomenon without explaining it. The Abraxian framework argues that the oscillation is generated by inhabiting a god-image that contains both good and evil without resolution, under a regulatory architecture that requires structural integrity rather than consolation, producing a phenomenological record that keeps returning to the same opposites because the opposites are the permanent structure of reality rather than a temporary problem awaiting solution. This is the framework that the text appears to be groping toward and yet does not quite reach because the vocabulary for naming the crucifixion of opposites as a structural condition did not exist in 300 BCE, was not available through the Yahwist tradition he was operating within, and would not be named for another two millennia.

A Brief History

Ecclesiastes is one of the “wisdom books” of the Old Testament attributed to King Solomon, although the modern scholarly consensus is that Solomon did not write it3, that it was attributed to him to give the text weight and power, primarily on the basis of Persian loanwords included in the text like pardes (garden) and pitgam (sentence), where there was no influence of Persia in the region until ~400 years post-Solomon’s rule. It was included in the formal Old Testament corpus with a significant amount of controversy. The book is quite pessimistic in many places, despairing at the injustice of the world, that rulers often are weak and fail at their role, that the wicked prosper and the innocent suffer, and its many contradictions and apparent clashes with other scriptures like Proverbs made it a problematic candidate for inclusion as a sacred text. It is also psychologically destabilizing by being quite antinomian in places; if God’s justice is often absent and if everything on this plane is “vanity” – ephemeral, built on a false conception that actions last forever and that one will be redeemed – then why should one follow kings, rulers, leaders? And it is also non-redemptive with a cyclical, not a linear view of history where the same things happen over and over again.4 The rabbinic debates at Jamnia (around 90 CE) and in the Talmud (b. Shabbat 30b) show genuine uncertainty about whether Ecclesiastes “defiles the hands” – the technical criterion for canonical inclusion – with the school of Shammai opposing inclusion and the school of Hillel accepting it. What the Talmudic discussions show is concern about the book’s apparent contradictions (Ecclesiastes 8:15 recommending enjoyment versus 2:2 calling laughter madness) and its heterodox teaching, with various attempts to harmonize the contradictions through allegorical reading.5 The allegorical solution offered where “eating and drinking” means study of Torah, “vanity” refers to excessive worldly attachment, etc., became dominant by the fourth century CE among both Jewish and Christian interpreters and effectively neutralized the text’s radicalism by reading it as a conventional religious text in unusual dress.6

It’s not clear why Jewish leaders included the text in the corpus – other works attributed to Solomon were not included – but from what I can surmise, it is a combination of the alleged Solomon authorship7, a “steelmanning” of the Orthodox perspective by offering engagement with the painful realities of life and possible Hellenic influence in a contained manner, and appending the work with a conclusion (likely by a subsequent author) with a neat summary about “fearing God” and obeying the commandments (which reminds me of institutional oversight reports in Washington D.C. which reveal tremendous corruption within the institutions, but then stick on a summary and conclusion that contradict the actual findings).

As Meir Zlotowitz states in Koheles: ArtScroll Tanach Series, xli- xlii: “The Sages sought to hide the book of Koheles because its statements [apparently] contradict one another. Why didn’t they conceal it? Because it commences with words of Torah and it concludes with words of Torah.” And: “In spite of the fact that Koheles was part of the Sacred Writings, it was feared that it could be a dangerous book because, to the unlearned, it seemed to contain contradictions. The Midrash goes even further than does the Talmud – according to the Midrash, it was feared that unlearned people might even make heretical interpretations of parts of Koheles. Therefore there was an opinion among the Sages that perhaps Koheles, sacred though it was, should be concealed lest it cause mistaken or heretical ideas….The conclusion concerning Koheles was that it should not be concealed because its opening and its conclusion show beyond a doubt that it is a book filled with fear of God and the spirit of Torah.” The Jewish scholar Rashbam, as recounted in The Commentary of R. Samuel Ben Meier Rashbam on Qoheleth, p. 34, “was the first to realize that the book of Qoheleth is set within a framework, consisting of the book’s first two verses and the last seven. According to him these verses were written by “those who edited it (the book)”.”

Pairs of Opposites

The book is structured as an exploration of whether any of the opposite polarities of life are sufficient to hold the crucifixion of opposites; from inside the crucifixion he explores wealth, power, sex, building, hoping to find something, anything, that survives a skeptical, questioning approach down to first principles. Scholars point to Qoheleth’s use of a poetic device called a merism, which uses polar opposites to encompass everything in between, thereby expressing totality – the most famous example is the poem in Ecclesiastes 3, which lists fourteen pairs of opposites (a time to be born and a time to die; a time to plant and a time to uproot, etc). Here are some of the primary pairs articulated throughout:

The Existential and Theological Opposites

1. Life and Death. The most fundamental pair. Qoheleth returns to it obsessively: both the wise and the foolish die; both the righteous and the wicked share the same fate. “For the fate of the sons of men and the fate of beasts is the same; as one dies, so dies the other. They all have the same breath, and man has no advantage over the beasts; for all is vanity.” (3:19)
2. Meaning and Meaninglessness (Vanity). The entire book is structured around this oscillation. Qoheleth declares everything “vanity of vanities” (1:2), yet he still seeks meaning in work, wisdom, and pleasure. He never resolves this tension.
3. Wisdom and Folly. Qoheleth praises wisdom as better than folly (2:13-14), yet he also acknowledges that the same fate awaits both (2:15-16), and that “much wisdom is much vexation” (1:18). Wisdom is valuable and insufficient.
4. Joy and Sorrow. He counsels enjoyment of life’s pleasures (3:12-13, 5:18-20), yet the entire book is saturated with sorrow and the “unhappy business that God has given to the sons of men” (1:13).
5. God’s Inscrutability and Human Agency. God is sovereign, yet humans are told to work and enjoy their portion. God’s ways are unknowable, yet humans are to “fear God and keep his commandments” (12:13). The tension is never resolved.
6. Justice and Injustice. Qoheleth observes that “the righteous get what the wicked deserve, and the wicked get what the righteous deserve” (8:14). He acknowledges a kind of cosmic justice (11:9, 12:14), yet he also sees that “there is no man who has power over the day of death” (8:8). Justice is promised and absent.

The Social and Ethical Opposites

7. Wealth and Poverty. He acknowledges that wealth is a blessing (5:19), yet he also sees that the rich suffer from sleeplessness and the weariness of acquiring (2:23), and that the poor may be better off in some ways (4:13). Money is good and worthless.
8. Toil and Rest. Work is a gift (3:13), yet it is also “vexation” and “striving after wind” (2:22). The laborer may enjoy his portion, yet his days are full of pain (2:23).
9. The Powerful and the Oppressed. He observes oppression (4:1), yet he also counsels submission to the king (8:2-5). Power is corrupt and necessary.
10. The Individual and the Collective. He acknowledges that “two are better than one” (4:9-12), yet he also warns against the “vanity” of amassing followers and popularity (4:15-16). Solitude is both valuable and dangerous.

The Temporal and Natural Opposites

11. Time and Eternity. “He has made everything beautiful in its time; also he has put eternity into man’s mind, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end” (3:11). Humans inhabit time but sense something beyond it – a permanent tension.
12. Order and Chaos. There is “a time for every matter under heaven” (3:1-8), yet life is also unpredictable, full of “chance” (9:11). The world is ordered and chaotic.
13. The Seasons and the Mundane. The famous passage (3:1-8) juxtaposes birth and death, planting and uprooting, killing and healing, weeping and laughing, mourning and dancing, casting away stones and gathering them, embracing and refraining, seeking and losing, keeping and throwing away, tearing and mending, silence and speech, love and hate, war and peace. These are not resolved into a higher synthesis; they simply are.

The Psychological and Personal Opposites

14. Joy and Sorrow. Qoheleth advises: “In the day of prosperity be joyful, and in the day of adversity consider; God has made the one as well as the other” (7:14). Both are from God, and there is no redemption from either.
15. Hope and Despair. There are moments of hope – ”I perceived that there is nothing better for them than to be joyful” (3:12) – yet the overall tone is despair. He never reconciles the two.
16. Desire and Satisfaction. He describes the endless cycle of desire: “The eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing” (1:8). Yet he also advises eating and drinking and enjoying one’s portion (3:13). Desire is a treadmill; enjoyment is a gift.
17. The Fear of God and the Inaccessibility of God. Qoheleth tells us to fear God (5:7), yet he also says God is unknowable (3:11, 8:17). The fear is not an intellectual grasp of God; it’s a response to the overwhelming mystery.

The Structural Opposites

18. The Body and the Spirit. In the final chapter, Qoheleth describes the “silver cord” being snapped, the “golden bowl” being broken (12:6), and the dust returning to the earth as the spirit returns to God. Body and spirit are distinguished but connected in death.
19. Memory and Oblivion. Qoheleth repeatedly warns that “the former things are not remembered, nor will they be remembered by those who come after” (1:11). Yet he writes a book to be read, hoping to preserve some memory. He writes against oblivion even as he acknowledges its inevitability.
20. The Living and the Dead. He famously observes: “A living dog is better than a dead lion. For the living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing” (9:4-5). Life is superior to death, yet death is the end of all. This is not resolved – the living have hope, the dead have peace.

The author holds these tensions and oscillates between them without offloading them onto a redemptive framework. He doesn’t say “suffering is temporary,” “justice will prevail,” or “meaning will be restored.” He says this is how life is – joy and sorrow, wisdom and folly, toil and rest, birth and death – and we must simply live within it. The oscillation – wisdom is better than folly, but the wise man dies like the fool; there is nothing better than eating and drinking, but this too is vanity; God has made everything appropriate in its time, but man cannot find out what God has done from beginning to end – is not rhetorical inconsistency or a dialectic toward resolution. It’s phenomenological reporting from inside the crucifixion, oscillating because no stable position exists.

And from that oscillation he keeps asking whether any pole can bear existence. He tries wisdom, pleasure, labor, wealth, political power, reputation, and each one fails as a final organizing principle. Each time Qohelet finds a foothold (wisdom is valuable, enjoyment is good, labor has its place) he immediately tests it against reality and finds it insufficient. Not false, but insufficient; vanity as in hebel – breath, vapor, something real but impossible to hold permanently. The privatio boni reader cannot see this because its framework demands that the oscillation be resolved, where either Qohelet is finally saying “fear God and keep the commandments” as the real takeaway via the tacked-on epilogue, or the pessimism is being deployed as a foil to be overcome by theological resolution. This was my core problem with Craig G. Bartholomew’s scholarly and well-written Christian-based exegesis of the text, which is a good translation and which I recommend, because he does not phenomenologically feel the oscillation himself – to me it is a feeling first, intellectualized after, not the other way around.8 Russell Meek of the Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary has a short and easy to read evangelical take where he does feel the pain of living, but he largely misses the point of the text.9 This is not intended as an appeal to feeling as its own justification – my approach asks whether somatic recognition and the framework’s predictive and interpretive accuracy over time confirm each other, not whether either one alone is pleasant to sit with. Bartholomew uses a Protestant-deontological approach to try to find the “truth” of the text so that he goes to Heaven when he dies, which is not my approach and, I think, not Ecclesiastes’ either; a point, to be fair, that Bartholomew recognizes.10 My reading sits in uncertainty without resolution, because the Abraxian framework has a name for what sitting still in the unresolved oscillation actually is: the crucifixion of opposites held internally, not offloaded and not resolved.

Other analytical attempts are worse than Bartholomew’s: Meir Zlotowitz’s Koheles: ArtScroll Tanach Series intensely offloads the crucifixion of opposites onto a redemptive holiness of the Torah (occasionally in almost comically over the top ways11), much as all the rabbinical sources he quotes do as well. As he explains, p. 92, “The meaning, as explained by Rashi, is that eventually God judges all, and although judgment appears delayed, everyone’s time comes eventually, for there is a time for everything – even for retribution – and judgment will assuredly come.” Bartholomew at least understands the oscillation – to Zlotowitz, the oscillation are simply doubts that ultimately resolve in favor of the Torah, although there are occasional unintended hints to the contrary.12 And R. Samuel Ben Meier (“Rashbam”, an exalted Jewish scholar)’s exegesis written in the 12th century, as translated by Sara Japhet and Robert B. Salters, is even worse: he not only collapses ambiguity into firm choices13 (like translating a phrase into “covered wagons” instead of “many concubines”, the latter which both makes more sense as the author purports to be a powerful King and is the scholarly consensus) but he collapses the opposites employed by inserting quotations -without basis to refer to heterodox perspectives which Qohelet attacks from an orthodox viewpoint! p. 54: “Common to all of the above sections is a certain linguistic or literary factor which led Rashbam to posit the existence of a quotation.” This is a disastrous misread.

Conclusion

Ecclesiastes is the earliest articulation I know of of the crucifixion of opposites from a lived phenomenological perspective, the permanent, unresolved tension of being alive. The text, with its tragic wisdom and its God of totality, is a remnant of an older, non-redemptive consciousness along with Heraclitus and Greek tragedy, something from an earlier where mankind was more in touch with the tragedy of life and before the redemptive framework was introduced to bear the crucifixion of opposites; it is a voice from before the “solidification” of the world (Guenon’s conception) into a dualistic, redemptive framework, which is why it resonates so strongly with my project. Polytheism, for all its inaccuracy as cosmology, was in one respect structurally closer to lived reality than the privatio boni that would later govern the Western world: it did not require suppressing the evil pole of life. Ecclesiastes stands after that distribution has collapsed into a single, answerable god, but before any theology exists that can hold what polytheism had merely divided.14 What Qohelet lacks is both the language for totality and the differentiated relationship to one’s own contradictory energies that a much later psychology would call individuation, which did not yet exist for him as an available vocabulary. He is stranded between a solution no longer available within his own tradition – though very much alive in the world around him, in Hellenistic and Near Eastern religion he would have had direct contact with – and one not yet invented, which is why the text can only oscillate.

Qoheleth, to my reading, was writing from a similar structural position as my own: finite, limited, bearing the crucifixion of opposites without redemption, oriented toward structural integrity rather than social reward, status, meaning, or control.15 Given this, the author of Ecclesiastes was possibly a marginalized teacher or sage working on the fringes of the institutional religious establishment, gifted with insight but ignored during his lifetime because his perspective was too disturbing, too antinomian, too lacking in consolation, resonant with a small group who recognized the value of his perspective, who preserved his writings and posthumously “adopted” by the tradition through the redemptive ending and the attribution to Solomon. This may be projection, of course, seeing my reflection in Ecclesiastes; I am ignored by the mainstream (few followers, no fame, no institutional support), my work is too destabilizing for most people, too focused on the opposites, too non-redemptive, and my work contains antinomian implications (the critique of authority, the relativization of power), and I resonate with a small group, like the coherence-regulated, schizotypy-leaning figures who recognize themselves in this work. Regardless, from my perspective I see the author of Ecclesiastes as containing ancient resonance to my work in thought and possibly in constitutional type, social position, and relationship to the tradition. I make no claim that my work will have any particular resonance, either in the short term or longterm and which would otherwise be inflationary (and against how my work has been received thus far), but I thought it was important to comment on why I found it resonant regardless.

Ultimately, Ecclesiastes is a systematic elimination of false stabilizers. He’s running repeated experiments: Will work stabilize me? No. Will pleasure stabilize me? No. Will wisdom stabilize me? Better than folly, but no. Will wealth stabilize me? No. Will political success stabilize me? No. The surviving position is much thinner: Receive your portion, recognize your limits, fear God, and continue living despite the absence of comprehensive resolution. This surviving position has a name in the text itself: heleq, “portion” or “lot,” repeated at 2:10, 3:22, 5:18, and 9:9. Traditional readings split it into either hedonism (eat and drink because nothing matters) or resignation (eat and drink because there is nothing else). But heleq carries no promise that the portion accumulates into anything and no assurance that following it resolves the oscillation; it is simply the one foothold still standing once wisdom, wealth, legacy, and pleasure pursued as ends have each been tested and found insufficient. This is not a different claim from the wisdom-folly or joy-sorrow oscillations documented above, it is what remains after every other candidate for a stable position has burned off.

With that said, Qohelet’s god-image is not quite Abraxian totality – it’s a god-image that contains evil without being fully theorized as totality, which is why from this reading the oscillation never fully resolves even into the cold comfort of coherence that my own position reaches. Qohelet performs the crucifixion of opposites under a god-image that is partially but not fully adequate to what he is experiencing. He gets close to the Abraxian position repeatedly and then pulls back – not into the privatio boni (he never installs cosmic justice as a consolation) but into the carpe diem provisional handholds that are his only available response to a structural condition he can name but not fully articulate.

It has been very helpful to have found a predecessor in an anonymous ancient teacher whose name is uncertain and whose work almost didn’t survive. Qohelet did not have the vocabulary of Abraxas, but he had the somatic experience of totality. In an era where the redemptive egregores are finally rupturing, his words increasingly call for being wrestled with again under a reemerging God image of totality.

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1

I will note that Schopenhauer did cover the work in Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), where he quotes Ecclesiastes directly and approvingly – particularly the “vanity of vanities” theme – as corroboration of his own pessimism about the will-to-live, while Nietzsche, despite his own attacks on the privatio boni, was too invested in the will-to-power and the revaluation of values to sit still in Ecclesiastes’ oscillation.

2

Per Bartholomew, Ecclesiastes, p. 81: “The opposing perspectives are deliberately juxtaposed so that gaps are opened in the reading, and the book is precisely about who to resolve the tension between these contradictory juxtapositions. The juxtaposing of contradictory perspectives producing gaps is part of the very fabric of Ecclesiastes. This has never been consciously studied by commentators, although of course they work with the phenomenon all the time. Those who see Qohelet as ultimately positive tend to smooth over the gaps, whereas those who recognize the gaps tend to see Qohelet as a pessimist with the carpe diem passages as hedonistic resignations or as additions.”

And p. 93: “Commentators remain polarized as to whether Ecclesiastes is fundamentally positive, affirming joy, or basically pessimistic. The majority incline to the latter view. in my view scholars continually fall into the trap of leveling Qohelet toward his hebel pole, or toward his carpe diem – affirmation-of-joy pole. This is to ignore the literary juxtaposition of contradictory views that is central to the gook and the life-death tension it embodies. Qohelet’s autonomous epistemology, depending on observation, experience, and reason alone, leads him continually to the hebel conclusion, where is juxtaposed again and again with his carpe diem confessions of the goodness of life. The book is about the struggle to live with and resolve the agnoized tension between these two poles.”

3

I tried reading Irish Anglican clergyman Charles Henry Hamilton Wright’s 1883 exploration of the history and authorship of the book of Koheleth where he reluctantly agrees that Solomon did not write it, but it was extremely pedantic and written in a drawn out, dry and boring style, and I gave up after about 120 pages.

4

p. 117: “This poem expresses, on the basis of observation, a cyclical view of history, in contrast to the OT’s cyclical and linear view. In the poem observation of the repetitiveness of nature leads to finding an analogical repetitiveness in history…Observation is central to Qohelet’s epistemology, and if on the basis of observation one concludes that history is endlessly repetitive, then it is indeed hard to see the value of labor and of life.”

5

p. 18: “The origin of this particular dispute is uncertain, but it centered on Ecclesiastes’ secular character, the great difficulty of harmonizing its contradictions (the Talmud mentions the conflicts between Eccles. 7:3 and 2:2 and between 8:15 and 2:2. See Beckwith…where he points out that the rabbis were experts at scriptural harmonization, and thus their problems with Ecclesiastes meant that they found its contradictions especially difficult to harmonize), and the passages with supposed heretical tendencies, such as 1:3 and 11:9.”

6

See Meir Zlotowitz states in Koheles: ArtScroll Tanach Series, p. 118: “Note the Midrash: All the eating and drinking mentioned in this Book refers to Torah and good deeds. The most clear proof is 8:15. Do, then, food and drink accompany man to the grave? What does accompany him? Torah and good deeds. “And enjoy pleasure” i.e. indulge in Torah study and be satisfied with his lot (Rashi).”

7

A useful contrast is Ecclesiasticus (Sirach), written roughly a century after Qohelet and excluded from the Jewish and most Protestant canons despite being doctrinally safer, not harder to harmonize. Where Qohelet oscillates without resolving, Sirach reasserts retributive order confidently, at points explicitly warning against Qohelet-style doubt (5:4). It uses a device close to Ecclesiastes 3’s merism – pairing opposites, good against evil, life against death – but resolves the tension rather than holding it open: the pairing exists, on Sirach’s reading, so the righteous have a foil against which to be measured. (Translations vary in register here – some render it as smoothly parallel to Qohelet’s poem, others more literally as “good against evil, life against death, the sinner against the just” – but the content is the same regardless of translation.) The same rhetorical device, the same genre, roughly the same era, and the opposite conclusion. That Sirach was excluded while Ecclesiastes was retained ironically and strangely appears to owe less to either book’s content than to authorship: Sirach’s author was known and comparatively recent, disqualifying it under criteria that let Ecclesiastes in only because its unresolved, destabilizing oscillation – easily readable as heretical and undermining of authority – could be attributed to Solomon.

8

I mentioned in passing in prior posts the death of a friend of mind, who phenomenologically felt the philosophical pessimism of the world – we bonded over this, and I don’t have any other real life friends who felt the pain of the world on this level. Perhaps this is why I miss him. But regardless, the feeling comes before the intellectual articulation or it doesn’t, but if it doesn’t it’s a different project than what I’m doing.

9

Meek lost his wonderful grandmother who raised him to cancer when he was young, and his father abandoned his family; he later dealt with drug and alcohol abuse issues. He resonated with Ecclesiastes because he thought its message was that in a world of unfairness which is turned upside down, one should appreciate God’s gifts and fear him. It acknowledges the pain of the world but provides this course of action regardless. This is the orthodox message of the appended-on ending, yes, but he does the standard Protestant take of treating the text as holy and trying to derive God-given meaning from the words themselves, tying it to Genesis and word-interpretation and the like, while reaffirming God as all-good and evil arising from mankind’s original sin. The point of the text, though, is the oscillation between poles as an intrinsic part of existence, and he totally misses this (perhaps because Protestants by and large deny the unconscious from which these poles arise from).

10

Bartholomew, p. 380: “What we do know is that Qohelet found himself confronted in an unavoidable way with the utter enigma of life. From a Jungian perspective, Qohelet had two choices: he could repress the experience because of its pain and capacity to wound him deeply, or he could enter the experience, surrender to it, not knowing precisely where it would take him. This is not so much a philosophy of despairvas it is an acceptance that says, “I can no longer live my life as I have before. I have to enter this terrifying realm of uncertainty and see where it leads, because all the things that brought me meaning are now in question.” Qohelet chooses the latter option, but it is not the easy one; rather, it is a journey of deep suffering that pervades every part of his being.”

11

Zlotowitz, p. 140: “Rashi explains that one must grasp both good and ‘evil’ – i.e. if a prophet tells you to do something which appears to be evil, you must have confidence and obey him.” As discussed previously, the crucifixion of opposites is a fundamental part of being alive, and the three basic responses are (1) offloading it to authority/institutions, (2) antinomian predation, or (3) the individuation process, holding the crucifixion within. Zlotowitz and the establishment rabbinical tradition are solidly within #1.

12

Zlotowitz, quoting Rabbi Yaakov Kiffel’s elaboration on a teaching attributed to Rabbi Meir, p. 137-138: “Rabbi Meir said: When God created something on this world, he created its opposite extreme. He created mountains and valleys, oceans and rivers. This concept can be extended to all of creation which is replete with opposite extremes. The size of the universe with its stars, galaxies, and outer cosmos, is virtually infinite; we also find that the minuteness of atoms and their component particles are beyond imagination. The orbits of stars and planets are similar to the orbits of electrons around the nuclei of atoms. Most matter is charged with opposite electrical charges, positive and negative. Magnetism has opposite poles. There is matter that exists for millenia and particles whose existence lasts the barest fraction of a second. Science does not yet know the extremes of hot and cold. There are holy and profane, male and female, light and darkness, giver and receiver, influencer and influenced – all examples of the parallel nature of creation.

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p. 61: “The understanding of the literal meaning as…is the origin of one of the leading characteristics of Rashbam’s commentaries, i.e. that a text has only one, single meaning. This principle is applied with absolute consistency throughout the commentary on Qoheleth. A word, a phrase, a verse – when found in a given context – can have one and only one interpretation. Thus the practice which is so common in Jewish exegetical tradition, including medieval commentators, of suggesting several possibilities for interpreting a given text, is completely absent from Rashbam’s works.”

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The polytheistic pantheon functioned structurally as a set of containers: a war god, a fertility god, a chaos figure and an order figure, each permitted to embody one pole of an opposition without the pressure of reconciling it with the others. This is not a claim that polytheism was cosmologically correct – an ultimate ground existing outside spacetime, on the premise inherited here from Neoplatonic and Kabbalistic monism (Plotinus’s One, Ein Sof), would be infinite, and infinitude entails unity rather than the plurality of finite, competing agents polytheism posits. But the error was in the multiplication of the ground, not in the content it was made to hold: a pantheon that lets one god be terrible and another be kind is, at the level of lived experience, a more honest map of a world that contains both than a single god from whom the terrible has been surgically removed and reassigned to a rival cosmic principle. What polytheism externalized as competing deities is structurally the same differentiation that a later individuation psychology (via Hillman) and as the formal Abraxian logic would relocate inside the psyche as energy currents to be related to without identification rather than projected outward or discharged – the gods are reborn, not necessarily as literal beings, but as differentiated positions within a single psyche that has absorbed what was once distributed among many. Qohelet has access to neither version. The external containers have already been foreclosed by the collapse to one god, and the internal containers (the individuation technology that would let him consciously differentiate and relate to what he is carrying rather than either projecting it outward or being crushed by it undifferentiated) do not yet exist as an available concept. He is not merely testing containers and finding them wanting; he is stranded in the gap between an old solution that has closed and a new one not yet invented, which is why the book can only oscillate rather than resolve.

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My interpretation of his energy profile has tentative parallels to my own – i.e. Saturnian exterior, Dionysian interior, with Hermes as mediator, melancholic primary humor with choleric overlay, low sanguine, stabilized by coherence and with a God image approaching Abraxas.

1. Saturnian exterior: The voice of the book is sober, measured, world-weary, cautious. He observes limits, warns against excess, counsels restraint. The famous “time for everything” poem (3:1-8) is Saturnian in its structure -everything has its season, its boundary, its limit. He is the Teacher, the Qoheleth, a figure of authority and gravity. Dionysian interior:Beneath the sober exterior, there is a wildness. The book oscillates between despair and ecstatic enjoyment -”eat, drink, and be merry” (8:15) sounds Dionysian. He sees the world’s chaos, its injustice, its absurdity, and his response is not to deny it but to register it fully. The frustration with injustice (4:1-3, 8:14) has a Dionysian rage beneath the Saturnian resignation.Hermes as mediator: The book itself is the mediation. Qoheleth writes. He observes, reflects, and writes it down. The writing is the synthesis – the “I saw,” “I considered,” “I said in my heart” that structures the entire book. He is not acting out the Dionysian chaos or imposing Saturnian order; he is writing through it.
2. Humors Primarily melancholic with choleric overlays, low sanguine. Qoheleth is melancholic – the book is saturated with the “vanity of vanities” refrain. He processes life’s contradictions with deep interiority, not through action or social engagement. His world-weariness is melancholic; he has seen everything and found it wanting. The choleric overlay shows in his sharp judgments. He does not merely observe; he judges. The critique of the king (4:13-16), the condemnation of oppression (5:8-9), the warnings against folly (10:1-20), these have a choleric edge, a willingness to say “this is wrong.” The low sanguine is evident in his avoidance of social performance, his solitude, and his repeated emphasis on the limits of human connection (4:7-8, 4:9-12). He is not a social being; he is a solitary observer. He processes energy through introspection, not social performance.
3. Primary Stabilizer: Coherence Coherence and truth-consistency. This is the most obvious match. Qoheleth is relentlessly, obsessively committed to structural honesty. He refuses to suppress contradiction. He observes: Wisdom is better than folly, yet both share the same fate (2:13-16). The righteous suffer, the wicked prosper (8:14). There is a time for everything, yet you cannot control which time you are in (3:1-8). God is inscrutable, yet you are to fear Him (3:11, 5:7, 12:13). He does not resolve these contradictions. He does not offer a synthesis, he presents them as the structure of reality and refuses to pretend otherwise. This is the coherence-regulated response to the world: truth-consistency at all costs, even if it means bearing unbearable tension. Conclusion: Qoheleth is coherence-primary. His regulatory system requires structural integrity. He cannot suppress what the body registers as contradictory.
4. God-Image: Abraxas The horrifying unity of good and evil, totality. Qoheleth’s God is Elohim, not Yahweh – the cosmic God, not the covenantal God (a pattern likely also explained by Wisdom-genre convention rather than deliberate theological signaling, but suggestive here regardless). This is the God of totality: He is all-powerful (3:11, 8:17). He is inscrutable (3:11, 7:14, 8:17, 11:5). He is the source of both joy (3:12-13) and sorrow (7:13-14). He is sovereign over life and death (8:8). Qoheleth never suggests that God is all-good in the privatio boni sense. He never appeals to the covenant or to divine justice as a cosmic guarantee. The tacked-on ending (12:13-14) is a later attempt to force a redemptive reading, but the book itself is structurally non-redemptive.

He also appears to me as as schizotypy-leaning (moderated by the coherence stabilizer), although this parallel is also meant lightly. Schizotypal features: Sense of alienation from ordinary meaning (”vanity of vanities” is a radical deconstruction of cultural meaning). Intense metaphysical engagement (the God-image, the problem of evil, the meaning of life). Solitary cognition (he observes, reflects, judges, not acts in community). High sensitivity to contradiction (he cannot tolerate the gap between the world as it should be and the world as it is). This combination of schizotypal features + coherence regulation produces a specific pattern: intense, solitary, systematic cognition oriented toward structural truth, with low reward from social performance, low tolerance for contradiction, and high capacity for bearing existential bleakness as long as the structural frame holds.