Ecclesiastes12chapter 12

Ecclesiastes 12:1-2

The book's last counsel is aimed at its youngest reader: remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth, before the evil days arrive and the years close in. The commentators mark the word's weight, remembering as allegiance rather than recollection, chosen while choosing is still easy. The darkened lights and the clouds that return after the rain open the poem of old age: in youth the storms pass and the sky clears, and in age, as Delitzsch puts it, one trouble follows another like rain returning on rain.

Ecclesiastes 12:3-5

The failing body is drawn as a failing estate, and the bench has decoded it member by member since the Targum: the trembling keepers as the hands, the bowing strong men as the legs, the grinders ceasing because they are few as the teeth, the darkened windows as the eyes, the doors shut in the streets as the ears, rising at the voice of the bird as the old man's broken sleep, the flourishing almond tree as the white head. The poem itself never decodes, and the readings are carried as the readings they are, some of them (the grasshopper's burden, desire failing) argued differently across the bench. What is not figurative is the destination stated plainly: man goeth to his long home, and the mourners go about the streets.

Ecclesiastes 12:6-8

Death arrives in four images of broken preciousness, the silver cord, the golden bowl, the pitcher at the fountain, the wheel at the cistern: a lamp falling when its cord gives way and a well whose drawing gear fails, life pictured as light and water cut off at their source. Verse 7 then speaks without figure and answers Genesis at both ends: the dust returns to the earth as it was (Gen 3:19), and the spirit returns unto God who gave it (Gen 2:7), which the bench reads as the book's furthest sight past the sun. Vanity of vanities at 12:8 closes the exact frame opened at 1:2, the phrase standing at those two verses and nowhere else in the book, so the whole search sits inside one repeated verdict.

Ecclesiastes 12:9-12

The epilogue steps back from the Preacher to commend him: he taught the people knowledge, sought out and set in order many proverbs, and sought acceptable words that were upright, even words of truth, the sentence the bench takes as the book's own claim to a place in Scripture. The words of the wise are as goads and as nails fastened, prodding and holding at once, and given from one shepherd, which the older writers read of the Lord as the source behind every true word; the reading is theirs by name. Of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh: the line every student underlines is a warning against study without the conclusion that follows, as Bridges reads it, not against study.

Ecclesiastes 12:13-14

The book files its own verdict: Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man, where the Hebrew reads simply this is the whole of man, the sum of what a man is for, as the commentators note. The fear of God has run under the search the whole way (3:14, 5:7, 7:18, 8:12), so the conclusion gathers a thread rather than reversing a book. The last verse answers the leveler that haunted every chapter: one event happened to all under the sun, but God shall bring every work into judgment, with every secret thing, and the bench sets Paul's day when God shall judge the secrets of men (Rom 2:16) beside it by name.