Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Ecclesiastes · About this commentary
Remember Your Creator
Ecclesiastes 12:1-8
1 Remember also your Creator in the days of your youth, before the evil days come, and the years draw near, when you will say, “I have no pleasure in them;” · WEB
The one place God is called Creator introduces a portrait of a body failing, and four broken objects say what the failure ends in.
Remember also your Creator in the days of your youth. It is the only time in the book God is named this way, and the title is chosen for the argument: the instruction is to remember the maker while the thing made still works.
The timing is stated as a deadline — before the evil days come, when you will say, I have no pleasure in them. The loss described is not of life but of appetite.
What follows is a household seen at dusk, and the details are drawn so that they read as a body without ever saying so. Keepers of the house trembling, strong men bowing, grinders ceasing because they are few, those who look out of the windows darkened. The doors shut on the street, the grinding gone quiet, a man startled awake at the voice of a bird, and all the daughters of music brought low. Fear of heights. The almond tree in white blossom. A grasshopper become a burden, and desire shall fail.
The correspondences are close enough that most readers make them without help — hands, legs, teeth, eyes, hearing, sleep, voice, white hair, and the weight of what used to be nothing. The passage never labels them, and its last clause removes any doubt about the subject: man goes to his everlasting home, and the mourners go about the streets.
Then four objects break, in verse 6. A silver cord severed. A golden bowl broken. A pitcher broken at the spring. A wheel broken at the cistern. Two of them are valuable and two are ordinary, and all four are things that carried something. Once broken, none can be repaired into what it was.
Verse 7 says what the breaking is: the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the spirit returns to God who gave it. Both halves are returns, and neither is a journey to somewhere new.
And verse 8 closes the frame with the sentence that opened it Ecclesiastes 1:2.
settled What this mark means