That time King Solomon took a break from his existential dread to ghostwrite a pop song
There’s a time and place for everything. For Ecclesiastes 3, this included a 20th century rebirth as a pop song.
The Byrds’ Turn! Turn! Turn! is exhibit A of the intersection of popular culture and Bible stories that this blog was created for. Pop Culture Bible Stories.
King Solomon had bars; many of them survived more or less untouched. “A time to uproot” even made it.
Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 is one of the more interestingly-written passages of the Bible. It lends itself surprisingly well to a pop adaptation. How many people heard Solomon’s words among the saccharine sounds, and smiled? How many smiled and enjoyed, never knowing it was the good book supplying the lyrics?
You’ve heard the phrase “there’s a time and place for everything”? There’s a Bible verse for that.
Ecclesiastes had gotten off to a gloomy start. Centuries before nihilism or existentialism took root, King Solomon was the guy who saw meaninglessness down every path.
“I became greater by far than anyone in Jerusalem before me,” Solomon wrote. (Ecc. 1:9)
”Yet when I surveyed all that my hands had done, and what I toiled to achieve, everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind; nothing was gained under the sun.” (Ecc. 1:11)
Wisdom didn’t matter, and folly didn’t matter, Solomon wrote, because both the wise man and the fool end up in the same place — dead.
What’s the point of it all? Solomon gets it in Ecclesiastes 3.
“There is a time for everything, and every activity under Heaven,” Solomon wrote.
Birth. Death. Killing. Healing. Silence. Speaking. Love. Hate. War. Peace.
Every season brings its challenges, and those challenges require tools.
Solomon comes around in the end, and is able to find some meaning in all of it.
Ecclesiastes 3:12-13: I know that there is nothing better for men than to be happy and do good while they live. That everyone may eat and drink and find satisfaction in his toil — this is the gift of God.”
Chase happiness, and you’ll be as empty as King Solomon in his old age.
Chase fulfillment. Either find satisfaction in your toil, or find a toil that satisfies.
Make progress in every season. Don’t wish it were some other season, or you were some other place. Work through this set of obstacles.
Yes, we will all die. But who among us will live, first?