How To Love Lit Podcast · Christy and Garry Shriver

Ecclesiastes - Episode 1 - Wisdom, Vanity And Chasing After The Wind!

·54 min·3 clips

Koheleth is not arguing that life is pointless, but that wealth, sex, and success are not enough.

They begin with Ecclesiastes. Christy and Gary identify it as a Jewish sacred text known in Christian tradition as Ecclesiastes and in Jewish tradition as Koheles, then note the common scholarly view that it was written by Solomon son of David while also stressing that there is no consensus about the dating of the book, whether King Solomon wrote it, or even whether he lived. The book is treated as troublesome from the start. Its writer speaks in ways that seem to clash with traditional religious belief and even with itself, so they read it as a text full of apparent tension rather than neat answers. The conversation turns philosophical. They compare Koheles with Albert Camus and point to The Myth of Sisyphus as a useful frame for its absurdist feel. Then the hosts shift to Solomon's world. They describe him as a king of peace rather than war, one who ruled without armed conflict and built stability through trade, alliances, and diplomacy. Peace, they argue, made wealth. They explain that Solomon made deals with neighboring nations, shared merchant ships with the Phoenicians, and negotiated for construction wood in ways that benefited him and the wider society. The episode keeps widening the picture. 2 Chronicles enters as evidence for the scale of that prosperity, with silver as common in Jerusalem as stones and cedar as abundant as sycamores in the lowlands. Marriages matter too. Solomon's 300 wives and more than 700 concubines are presented as political and cultural connections, especially through the daughter of Pharaoh and the verse about horses coming from Egypt and other lands. The costs are not softened. The hosts describe the 40,000 stalls of horses, the 12,000 horsemen, and the thousands of forced laborers, which they connect to the pressure required to sustain his grand projects. The buildings come next. They discuss the temple that became famous in its own time, Solomon's palace, the seven years spent on the temple, the thirteen years spent on the palace, and the legendary ivory-and-gold throne, while noting that the temple survived for centuries before Nebuchadnezzar burned it down. The close returns to wisdom. By the end, the episode argues that Koheles is asking how to live with the things that are actually good in this world and how to make those goods work together.

As heard by us

A patient reading of Ecclesiastes that treats its contradictions as the point.

This episode treats Ecclesiastes less like a settled devotional text and more like a problem worth sitting with. The hosts bring in Solomon, the dating questions, and the book's contradictions, then set that against Camus and The Myth of Sisyphus.

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Why you'd press play

You want Ecclesiastes read through Solomon, dating uncertainty, and Camus.

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