OPENING UP ECCLESIASTES
By Jim Winter
Day One. 160 pages. £6.00
ISBN 1903 087 86 4
Whenever I go into the centre of town I pass a pub called ‘The Scream’. On the wall is Edvard Munch’s iconic painting of that name and underneath is the strap line ‘it’s a scream’. It captures both the underlying angst of modern culture and the popular determination to trivialise it, or drown it in fleeting pleasures.
Disconcertingly, the book of Ecclesiastes reveals that exactly these emotions and coping strategies were being explored in Old Testament Israel. Jim Winter’s excellent little guide to Ecclesiastes captures this with vividness and punch. Some modern commentators have tried to present the author of Ecclesiastes, the Preacher, as primarily a ‘preacher of joy’, but Winter rightly emphasises that even the joy advocated is truncated and marred by the meaninglessness of life if it is only lived ‘under the sun’. He says that Ecclesiastes is ‘a brilliant artful argument for the way one would look at life if God did not play a direct intervening role in life, and if there were no life after death’. Ecclesiastes is thus ‘cynical wisdom’ which ‘acts as a foil or contrast to other books’. The faith of the Preacher does eventually shine through, but it is hard won faith, which has to live with shadows and longs for the sunshine of the New Testament.
