Jacques Ellul
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One of the best works available for understanding Eccl. 5 out of 5 stars.
53 of 53 people found this review helpful.
Jacques Ellul, professor emeritus of law at the University of Bordeau, France, has writen more than forty books, including "The Technological Bluff" and "Jesus and Marx". For over 50 years he prayed over and meditated on Ecclesiastes and desired to make Reason for Being his conclusion to his lifework. He approaches his interpretation and contemporary exegesis of Ecclesiastes topically; whereby he looks at the "themes of vanity" and interacts with these themes from his contemporary social analysis (power, money, work, happiness, goodness, justice and wisdom). Of the dozen or so commentaries on Ecclesiastes that I have recently read, I found Ellul's work to be one of the best for bringing balance and contemporary application. Many critics have label Ecclesiastes an incoherent collection of a skeptical and cynical writer, but Ellul sees the Ecclesiastes refreshingly different. He sees the writer as a teacher that faces the crude reality of life and demolishes values and illusions that many hold. Everything is question by the teacher but the presence and action of God. For Ellul the teacher is realistic and pragmatic, a spokesman of the actual reality of human life who tells it like it is. Ellul does a brilliant job delineating the contradictions that permeates the writing of Ecclesiastes. He notes that contradictions are "an essential principle of Ecclesiastes " and that truth in life and about life can not be found without realizing that life itself is contradictory. For Ellul Ecclesiastes affirms the true character of human existence, which itself is essentially contradictory. He states, "Qohelet, the teacher, is a skilled surgeon who opens wounds, including the one wound that dominates human life, and reveals the incredible confusion in our beliefs and assertions, our absolutes and our occupations. Unresolvable contractions forms one of the guidelines of this book." For example, regarding happiness, Ecclesiastes calls it worthless, yet he maintains that the only thing that a person can expect in this life is to take joy and pleasure and live as happily as possible - a contraction.
The two predominant and overriding strengths of Jacques Ellul's work are his topical treatment of the key issues that the Qohelet brings up and how he show that Qohelet's words are for us today contemporary and cosmopolitan. Ellul underlines how today "there is nothing new under the sun" regarding the nature of humankind. We still face a crisis of morality and philosophy, of human customs and grandeur, of the foundations of our collective life - a political crisis. He and Qohelet see a crisis of both the individual and society, a crisis of both the immediate and the chronic. The topical treatment that Ellul uses to illuminate the mind of the Q is refreshingly alive with current day application. He integrates the disorder and contractions inherent in our society today, into the word's and wisdom of the Q's day - over 2000 years ago.
His concluding chapter "God" removes Ellul from the radical harbinger that he is and places him back into the fold of orthodox Christianity. He fails to indite God, as Ecclesiastes did, for breach of covenant, but he does leave evil and injustice at the feet of God when he says "everything is made by God, but you can in no way explain or understand it.... God does everything including all the things that we just criticized." He retains a monotheistic "Christ Only" theology, whereby Christ is the "only one" person that God incarnated.
Without reservation I would recommend Reason for Being: A Meditation on Ecclesiastes for any student of the Old Testament. This book stands out as one of the most probing writings on the Qohelet today. What sets it apart from other commentaries on Ecclesiastes is the contemporary application to today's society that Jacques Ellul brings.
