Ecclesiastes 3: What the Passage Says

The Chapter in a Sentence

The chapter opens with a poem listing fourteen pairs of opposite times, each with its own season, and asks what a worker really gains from his labor. The Preacher says God has made everything beautiful in its time and set eternity in people's hearts, yet no one can trace out God's work from start to finish; so he concludes that eating, drinking, and finding good in one's work is God's gift. He then observes wickedness in the very place where justice should be, says God will judge both the righteous and the wicked, and notes that people and animals share the same breath, the same death, and the same dust.

Claim by Claim

1. 3:1
   • There is an appointed season for everything.
   • There is a time for every matter under the heavens.
2. 3:2
   • There is a time to be born.
   • There is a time to die.
   • There is a time to plant.
   • There is a time to uproot what is planted.
3. 3:3
   • There is a time to kill.
   • There is a time to heal.
   • There is a time to tear down.
   • There is a time to build.
4. 3:4
   • There is a time to weep.
   • There is a time to laugh.
   • There is a time to mourn.
   • There is a time to dance.
5. 3:5
   • There is a time to throw away stones.
   • There is a time to gather stones together.
   • There is a time to embrace.
   • There is a time to keep far from embracing.
6. 3:6
   • There is a time to seek.
   • There is a time to give up as lost.
   • There is a time to keep.
   • There is a time to throw away.
7. 3:7
   • There is a time to tear.
   • There is a time to sew.
   • There is a time to keep silent.
   • There is a time to speak.
8. 3:8
   • There is a time to love.
   • There is a time to hate.
   • There is a time of war.
   • There is a time of peace.
9. 3:9
   • The speaker asks what gain the worker gets from what he toils at.
10. 3:10
    • The speaker has seen the task that God has given to human beings.
    • God gave humans this task to be occupied with it.
11. 3:11
    • God has made everything beautiful in its time.
    • God has put eternity in the human heart; the word rendered 'the world' by the King James can mean either eternity or the span of time.
    • The result is that no person can find out the work that God has done.
    • The work God has done cannot be found out from beginning to end.
12. 3:12
    • The speaker knows there is no good for people except to rejoice.
    • The speaker knows there is no good for people except to do good during their life.
13. 3:13
    • Every person's eating is a gift of God.
    • Every person's drinking is a gift of God.
    • Every person's seeing good in all his toil is a gift of God.
14. 3:14
    • The speaker knows that whatever God does lasts forever.
    • Nothing can be added to what God does.
    • Nothing can be taken from what God does.
    • God has acted so that people would fear before him.
15. 3:15
    • What has already been is what is now.
    • What is to be has already been.
    • God seeks what is pursued; the phrase can mean God seeks out what has been driven away or requires an accounting for what is past.
16. 3:16
    • The speaker saw something further under the sun.
    • In the place of judgment there was wickedness.
    • In the place of righteousness there was wickedness.
17. 3:17
    • The speaker said in his heart that God will judge the righteous and the wicked.
    • The speaker gave as the reason that there is a time for every matter.
    • The speaker gave as the reason that there is a time for every work there.
18. 3:18
    • The speaker said in his heart something concerning human beings.
    • The speaker said that God tests them.
    • The speaker said that the purpose is that they see for themselves that they are beasts.
19. 3:19
    • What happens to human beings and what happens to beasts is the same fate.
    • One fate comes to both.
    • As the one dies, so dies the other.
    • They all have one breath.
    • Man has no advantage over the beast.
    • All is vapor.
20. 3:20
    • All go to one place.
    • All came from the dust.
    • All return to the dust.
21. 3:21
    • The speaker asks who knows the spirit of human beings, whether it goes upward.
    • The speaker asks who knows the spirit of the beast, whether it goes downward to the earth.
    • The Hebrew is ambiguous between asking whether the human spirit rises and asserting that it rises.
22. 3:22
    • The speaker saw that there is nothing better than that a person rejoice in his works.
    • A person's works are his portion.
    • The speaker asks who can bring a person to see what will be after him.

Words Worth Explaining

Every language note in this chapter, gathered. These explain what a word meant, never what it means for the reader.

3:1

"Under the sky" (in some verses "under the sun") is this book's standing phrase for the world of ordinary human life and experience, as opposed to what lies beyond it. The word rendered "activity" or "purpose" originally meant something one delights in or wants, and by the time this book was written had widened to mean any matter, affair or piece of business.

3:2

The Hebrew of the first line is literally "a time to give birth," though it is commonly and defensibly read as "a time to be born." "Pull up what was planted" is agricultural: uprooting a crop, not weeding.

3:5

Nobody knows for certain what throwing and gathering stones referred to. The usual suggestions are clearing a field of stones before planting and collecting stones for building, or scattering stones over an enemy's field to ruin it. Some ancient Jewish readers took the whole verse, both halves together, as a veiled reference to times for sexual intimacy and times for abstaining, since "embrace" can carry that sense.

3:6

In 1611 "get" could mean to search for something you have lost. That is the sense here, and it pairs with losing.

3:7

Tearing one's clothes was the standard public gesture of grief or shock in this culture, and the torn garment would be sewn up again when the period of mourning ended. So the pair is not about laundry but about the beginning and end of mourning.

3:9

"Gain" translates a word borrowed from commerce, the surplus or profit left over after the accounting is done. It runs through the whole book as the question of what, if anything, is left in a person's hand at the end.

3:10

"Sons of men," a Hebrew idiom for human beings in general, lies behind "people" here and in verses 18, 19 and 21. It carries no emphasis on males.

3:11

Two words are disputed here. "Beautiful" also means fitting or appropriate, made everything suit its own moment. And the phrase rendered "the whole stretch of time" translates a Hebrew word that elsewhere means a very long or unbounded span of time; ancient and modern readers have variously understood it as "eternity," "the ages," "the world," and even (from a similar-looking root) "what is hidden." The rendering keeps the temporal sense, but the word is genuinely uncertain.

3:12

The phrase translated "do good" can mean either acting well toward others or, as an idiom, faring well and enjoying oneself. Both readings are defensible here.

3:14

"Fear" in Hebrew covers a range from terror to awed respect, and is the ordinary word for the reverence owed to God; it does not necessarily imply being frightened.

3:15

The last clause is famously obscure. The Hebrew says roughly "God seeks what is pursued" or "what has been driven away." It has been understood as God calling the past to account, as God recalling or bringing back what has already gone by, and as God seeking out the persecuted. The rendering keeps the wording open.

3:16

"The place where justice should be" means the law court. In this period cases were heard by elders in the open space just inside the town gate, so it was a specific, physical place a reader would picture.

3:18

"Beasts" is the old word for animals. "The estate of the sons of men" means the condition people are in.

3:19

"Breath" here translates a Hebrew word that also means wind and spirit, the same word rendered "spirit" in verse 21. The argument depends on that overlap: people and animals draw the same breath. "Fleeting" translates the book's key word, which literally means a vapor or puff of breath, and is rendered "vanity" in older Bibles. It suggests something insubstantial and quickly gone rather than something worthless.

3:20

"Dust" is the loose dry earth of the ground. The line deliberately echoes the words spoken to Adam in Genesis 3:19, "dust you are, and to dust you shall return."

3:21

The Hebrew can be pointed and read two ways, and the ancient versions split on it: either as a question about whether the human spirit really does go up and the animal's down, or as a statement ("who knows the spirit of man, which goes upward") assuming that it does. The rendering preserves the question because the underlying text allows both.

3:22

"Share" translates the word used for the portion of land allotted to a family or the helping of food set before a guest, what has been assigned to a person as theirs. The last clause is also ambiguous: "what will happen after him" may mean after his death, or simply later in time, among those who come after him.