Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Ecclesiastes · About this commentary
A Time for Everything
Ecclesiastes 3:1-8
1 For everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven: · WEB
Fourteen matched pairs cover the whole range of human action, and the poem's neutrality is what unsettles readers who expect it to take sides.
The poem is exactly built: a time occurs twenty-eight times in verses 2 through 8, in fourteen pairs, four to a verse.
The pairs run from birth to death, planting to uprooting, killing to healing, demolition to construction, weeping to laughing, mourning to dancing, scattering stones to gathering them, embracing to refraining, seeking to losing, keeping to discarding, tearing to sewing, silence to speech, love to hate, and war to peace.
What the list does not do is rank them. There is no clause marking one half of any pair as the better half, and the poem includes killing, hating, and war without comment. It is a description of the range of human action rather than a permission or a prohibition.
That neutrality is why the poem is so often quoted for comfort and so rarely finished. Read to the end, it says that the destroying is as timed as the building.
The fourteenth pair also breaks the pattern. Every other item names an action — to be born, to plant, to keep silence — while the last names two conditions: a time for war, and a time for peace.
And the frame in verse 1 supplies the governing word: for everything there is a season. Not a right time chosen by the actor, but a season that arrives. The next verse will ask what profit anyone gets out of that, repeating the question from the book's opening Ecclesiastes 1:3.
The poem's comfort and its difficulty are the same sentence. Nothing is arbitrary, and nothing is up to the person living through it.
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