Ecclesiastes 11 Study Notes

11:7-12:7 Ecclesiastes is primarily concerned with making us understand that we are mortal, that our days are few, that all our works will fade away, and that we should govern our lives accordingly. In this, the last major passage of Ecclesiastes, the book reviews its essential conclusions about how we should spend the time we have. Essentially, the conclusion is twofold: enjoy your days under the sun and fear God.

11:7-8 In the Bible, light is often associated with life and darkness is associated with death. Light is beautiful, but the main point of light is sweet is that it is good to be alive. The assertion that the days of darkness . . . will be many does not deny the concept of an afterlife, nor does it specifically allude to an interim period between death and bodily resurrection. It is simply a way of saying that life is short but death is long. Enjoy these days because they are few and pass quickly.

11:9-10 In these verses two pieces of advice are in tension with each other. The first is that we should enjoy life and the second is that we should fear God. The danger is that some people will try to enjoy life by doing things that are offensive to God. Whoever does such things destroys himself and loses both happiness and God. On the other hand, those who have the wrong kind of fear of God believe that anything that makes people happy must be bad; thus, they deprive themselves of legitimate joys. A young person is specifically addressed because the elderly, as described in 12:1-7, are already in the grip of death; the capacity to enjoy life has to a degree already passed them by.