Ecclesiastes

• race is not to the swift

86:1.6This no­tion of chance and luck strongly per­vaded the phi­los­o­phy of all an­cient peo­ples. Even in re­cent times in the Wis­dom of Sol­o­mon it is said: “I re­turned and saw that the race is not to the swift, nor the bat­tle to the strong, nei­ther bread to the wise, nor riches to men of un­der­stand­ing, nor fa­vor to men of skill; but fate and chance be­fall them all. For man knows not his fate; as fishes are taken in an evil net, and as birds are caught in a snare, so are the sons of men snared in an evil time when it falls sud­denly upon them.”

• frankly pessimistic reaction to belief in Providence

97:8.2In or­der to un­der­stand how the dev­as­tat­ing pres­sure and the in­es­cap­able co­er­cion of sec­u­lar his­tory so ter­ror­ized the cap­tive and alien-ruled Jews that they at­tempted the com­plete rewrit­ing and re­cast­ing of their his­tory, we should briefly sur­vey the rec­ord of their per­plex­ing na­tional ex­pe­ri­ence. It must be re­mem­bered that the Jews failed to evolve an ad­e­quate non­the­o­logic phi­los­o­phy of life. They strug­gled with their orig­i­nal and Egyp­tian con­cept of di­vine re­wards for righ­teous­ness cou­pled with dire pun­ish­ments for sin. The drama of Job was some­thing of a protest against this er­ro­neous phi­los­o­phy. The frank pes­simism of Ec­cle­si­astes was a worldly wise re­ac­tion to these overop­ti­mistic be­liefs in Prov­i­dence.

• exemplifies Platonism and Stoicism

121:6.3Though the Hel­le­nized Jew­ish be­liefs were very lit­tle in­flu­enced by the teach­ings of the Epi­cure­ans, they were very ma­te­ri­ally af­fected by the phi­los­o­phy of Plato and the self-ab­ne­ga­tion doc­trines of the Sto­ics. The great in­road of Sto­icism is ex­em­pli­fied by the Fourth Book of the Mac­cabees; the pen­e­tra­tion of both Pla­tonic phi­los­o­phy and Stoic doc­trines is ex­hib­ited in the Wis­dom of Sol­o­mon. The Hel­le­nized Jews brought to the He­brew scrip­tures such an al­le­gor­i­cal in­ter­pre­ta­tion that they found no dif­fi­culty in con­form­ing He­brew the­ol­ogy with their revered Aris­totelian phi­los­o­phy. But this all led to dis­as­trous con­fu­sion un­til these prob­lems were taken in hand by Philo of Alexan­dria, who pro­ceeded to har­mo­nize and sys­tem­ize Greek phi­los­o­phy and He­brew the­ol­ogy into a com­pact and fairly con­sis­tent sys­tem of re­li­gious be­lief and prac­tice. And it was this later teach­ing of com­bined Greek phi­los­o­phy and He­brew the­ol­ogy that pre­vailed in Pales­tine when Je­sus lived and taught, and which Paul uti­lized as the foun­da­tion on which to build his more ad­vanced and en­light­en­ing cult of Chris­tian­ity.