I was watching a video by John Higgins this morning about the poem in Ecclesiastes 3, one of the most famous passages in the Bible.
There is a time for everything,
and a season for every activity under the heavens:a time to be born and a time to die,
a time to plant and a time to uproot,
a time to kill and a time to heal,
a time to tear down and a time to build,
a time to weep and a time to laugh,
a time to mourn and a time to dance,
a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,
a time to search and a time to give up,
a time to keep and a time to throw away,
a time to tear and a time to mend,
a time to be silent and a time to speak,
a time to love and a time to hate,
a time for war and a time for peace.
The poem has a great deal of symmetry, from birth and death to war and peace. It has seven couplets, and the number seven in the Bible is symbolic of perfection.
There is a repeated pattern of groups of four words: a time for X, a time for Y. The rhythm reminds me of Beethoven’s fifth symphony, especially the third movement [1].
Higgins points out that there’s something odd in the middle couplet:
a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,
It breaks the rhythm, at least in English translation, and presumably in the original language. The poem goes from intransitive adjectival infinitives —to plant, to uproot, etc.—to transitive—to gather stones. Also, the two parts of the couplet do not obviously fit together. There’s a similarity between birth and planting, between killing and tearing down, etc. But what’s the connection between casting stones and embracing?
Higgins explains that this deliberate symmetry breaking fits the theme of the Ecclesiastes as a whole. There is order to the world, and yet we don’t have it all figured out. Even when everything mostly makes sense, there’s something we don’t understand, like the middle couplet.
[1] This has been called the fate motif. There is an apocryphal story that Beethoven described it as such to his secretary and biographer Anton Schindler. Whether or not the story is true, the name is commonly used. Here’s the particular part I had in mind.
