Living Dogs and Dead Lions

So I reflected on all this, attempting to clear it all up. I concluded that the righteous and the wise, as well as their works, are in the hand of God; whether a person will be loved or hated – no one knows what lies ahead.
Everyone shares the same fate – the righteous and the wicked, the good and the bad, the ceremonially clean and unclean, those who offer sacrifices and those who do not. What happens to the good person, also happens to the sinner; what happens to those who make vows, also happens to those who are afraid to make vows. This is the unfortunate fact about everything that happens on earth: the same fate awaits everyone. In addition to this, the hearts of all people are full of evil, and there is folly in their hearts during their lives – then they die.
But whoever is among the living has hope; a live dog is better than a dead lion. For the living know that they will die, but the dead do not know anything; they have no further reward – and even the memory of them disappears. What they loved, as well as what they hated and envied, perished long ago, and they no longer have a part in anything that happens on earth.

Go, eat your food with joy, and drink your wine with a happy heart, because God has already approved your works. Let your clothes always be white, and do not spare precious ointment on your head. Enjoy life with your beloved wife during all the days of your fleeting life that God has given you on earth during all your fleeting days; for that is your reward in life and in your burdensome work on earth. Whatever you find to do with your hands, do it with all your might, because there is neither work nor planning nor knowledge nor wisdom in the grave, the place where you will eventually go (Ecclesiastes 9:1-10).

We are all going to die. So how should we live?

Throughout Ecclesiastes 1:1-6:12 the Preacher meditated upon the hevel of life under the sun: all is vain, futile – truly absurd. He compares most human endeavors toward meaning as “chasing after wind”: people pursue pleasure, wealth, wisdom, or other things looking for ultimate purpose and satisfaction and will be disappointed and frustrated by all of them. To rage against such truths is itself futile and striving after wind. God understands better than we do. In Ecclesiastes 7:1-8:9 the Preacher seemed to have set forth a series of aphoristic exhortations not unlike the proverbs for which he is well known loosely organized around the theme of wisdom. In Ecclesiastes 8:1-17 the Preacher would continue in the same aphoristic vein and loosely organized his exhortations around wisdom in terms of the exercise of and submission to power and observations about life but the ultimate limitations and failures of knowledge and wisdom.

We always do well to remember how chapter and verse divisions were added to the text at a far later period; even when they prove helpful for reference purposes, we should hold them lightly. In this way the Preacher’s observations in Ecclesiastes 9:1-6 flow directly from Ecclesiastes 8:14-17. Just as no human can truly comprehend what happens on the earth (Ecclesiastes 8:16-17), so humans also do not know their future (Ecclesiastes 9:1): their works are in God’s hands, whether wise or wicked, and whether they will experience love or hostility. While the Preacher has been confessing all he did not and could not know, he then returned to one of the things which he did know, and the reality which seemingly has informed and undergirded much of his fulminations: everyone dies. A person who is good and righteous, clean, and offers sacrifice? He or she dies. A person who is bad and wicked, unclean, and does not offer sacrifice? He or she dies. A person can make a thousand vows or be afraid to make any vowels at all: either way, they die (Ecclesiastes 9:2). Furthermore, since all are subject to corruption and decay (cf. Romans 5:12-21, 8:17-23), the human heart is full of evil and folly, and then they all die (Ecclesiastes 9:3).

The Preacher has rightly observed the condition of humanity “under the sun.” The universality of death has no doubt animated the Preacher’s sense of existential despair: everything is hevel, breath or vanity, because human life ultimately is but a breath or vanity. You can be the best and wisest person; in your wisdom you might delay the inevitable, but death will still come for you. Humans have been morally outraged for generations when people who have tried their best and have done well have died young and/or in poverty while many others who were wicked and depraved yet lived for quite some time in relative wealth. We all rail against the coming night; we all attempt to find something in which to invest our hope of life beyond this life, whether by building monuments, investing our time and energy in some kind of institution or power, through our influence on others, and/or through perpetuating our genetic line. No matter; we will all die regardless, and most of us will be all but forgotten within a few generations. We do everything we can to deny or suppress this bitter truth. The Preacher has been devastating all such pretense and ignorance and forces his audience to see their condition plainly.

Yet the Preacher can find a glimmer of hope in the situation of the living: they are alive and are conscious. He declared a live dog is better than a dead lion (Ecclesiastes 9:4): the lion has always been a symbol of power and elevated status, while dogs in the ancient world did not share in much esteem at all. Yet the live dog, even in his degraded status, is better than the dead lion; perhaps once majestic, but now a mere corpse rotting in the sun, picked over by scavengers. Thus the Preacher reckoned the living as in a better condition than the dead: the living have knowledge, while the dead know nothing, have no reward, have generally been forgotten, everything regarding which they cared has perished, and they have no active role in the existing creation (Ecclesiastes 9:5-6).

We do best to understand Ecclesiastes 9:5-6 in its own time and place and, as with Ecclesiastes 9:7-10, as encouragement for the living to enjoy life as long as they have it, and not succumb to existential despair. We have no reason to doubt or question the Preacher’s sincerity in his viewpoint regarding the finality of human death; the Psalter at times expresses a similar view of oblivion in Sheol (cf. Psalm 6:5). Oblivion might well be the fate of many souls on the final day, and it may end up being a grace for them. Many scholars understand the Preacher to represent a school of thought very much opposed to the developing confidence of many in Israel regarding life in the afterlife and the hope of resurrection. Yet we can also understand all such things in terms of progressive revelation: the focus of the covenant between God and Israel involved this earthly life, and the importance of life after death would become a far greater part of the life of Israel in the Second Temple Period and fully embodied in Jesus. At the very least, the Preacher’s observations about death stand at variance with Jesus’ solemn exhortation of God being the God of the living, not the dead, and explicitly in terms of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (cf. Matthew 22:31-32). We should also be able to appreciate the dangers of decontextualized proof-texting from this experience: the Preacher spoke based on his understanding and in terms of the understanding of his audience, and while he saw rightly in terms of life “under the sun,” God understands more than he did, as he himself confessed, and no doubt the Preacher himself has come to know the power of God over sin and death in Jesus.

In the face of imminent death and oblivion, what should people do? The Preacher unironically counsels to “eat, drink, and be merry” (cf. 1 Corinthians 15:32): people should enjoy their food and wine, of which God has approved; they should wear clean clothes and anoint themselves, and thus enjoy the little pamperings of life; a man should enjoy his conjugal relationship with his wife, for such is what God has given people to enjoy in their fleeting lives; and whatever they do for work they should do diligently, for there is no energy or work where they are going (Ecclesiastes 9:7-10).

Thus the Preacher again reinforces the core of his exhortation: everyone dies. Everything you hold dear in this creation will fade just like you fade. You cannot build up for yourself any kind of immortality on the earth. Our great frustration and our railing against these realities expresses the profound levels of delusion we maintain about our grandeur. The Preacher does not thus diminish the power or value of life; instead, he enhances it by reminding people of what they do have and what they can enjoy. The things we often consider the “little things” — enjoying a great meal with family and friends, enjoying romance and sexuality, working in ways we find meaningful and expending our energy in ways we find profitable — these are what make life worth living, and we should find some level of enjoyment in them. Wasting away our hours and years to construct a future which will never come and/or investing in schemes for immortality which will themselves fade away would prove to be the real tragedies. Harry Chapin’s “Cat’s in the Cradle” hits hard for this very reason. We say “no one on their deathbed wishes they had spent more time in the office” for good reason. Thus the Preacher has said his own version of these things; we can find similar thoughts in the Epic of Gilgamesh which is one of the earliest pieces of literature and wisdom ever recorded. None of this is new. And yet each successive generation still rails against the coming darkness and vainly attempts to invest their hopes of immortality in things which will ultimately perish. We are all Sisyphus; our quest for meaning in life “under the sun” is our heavy rock. We all know better, and yet we struggle to do better.

We consider 1 Corinthians 15:32 in order to demonstrate the tension Ecclesiastes 9:5-10 provides for the Christian, since the Preacher essentially commends an epicurean lifestyle. Not for nothing has our modern secular consensus ended up settling on a form of Epicureanism, because whenever you have limited your perspective to the material plane of existence, and create little if any space for the work of the divine, what else is really left as a viable philosophy of life? Do what you can to avoid pain; pursue what you find pleasurable in ways which cause the least amount of harm. The Preacher remains undefeated: there truly is nothing new under the sun, and what we deem new or modern is most likely something recycled from the past.

Paul wrote as he did in 1 Corinthians 15:32 because if there is no resurrection from the dead, then the Preacher and the Epicureans are absolutely correct. Yet Paul had seen Jesus in the resurrection, the firstfruits of the dead; and since Jesus is risen, Paul maintained great confidence He would return and all who share in Jesus would also share in the resurrection of life (1 Corinthians 15:1-58). Jesus is the most powerful testimony of how God is the God of the living, not the dead.

As Christians we should enjoy food and drink, giving thanks to the God who has given it and blessed it (1 Timothy 4:4-5). Christians who have been joined together by God in marriage should enjoy their romantic and conjugal relationship which is to be held in honor among everyone (1 Corinthians 7:1-4, Hebrews 13:4). During this life Christians should work diligently in order to provide for themselves, to have something for those in need, and to facilitate quiet and godly lives (1 Thessalonians 4:10-12, 2 Thessalonians 3:6-15, 1 Timothy 5:8). We do well to heed the wisdom of the Preacher, which is itself wisdom understood by humans in almost every age and time: you cannot take it with you; your pretensions for immortality on this earth are delusional; a life entirely lived for a future which will never arrive is the ultimate tragedy. Yet we do not lose hope, for our hope was never supposed to be in this life alone. God is the God of the living, not the dead; in Christ our future is not oblivion, but incorruptibility and immortality in the resurrection, and a new heavens and earth which will never fade or decay. May we serve God in Christ through the Spirit and obtain this resurrection of life!

Ethan R. Longhenry