Dr. Keith Essex · The Master's Seminary · 89 minutes
Lecture by Dr. Keith Essex, from The Master's Seminary's public channel. Study notes below from Medina Community Church.
This session closes the Writings' wisdom and steps into their final books. Dr. Essex weighs the authorship of Ecclesiastes and lands where inerrancy points, reads the book from its conclusion inward with fear God at the center, and then opens Lamentations: grief in perfect acrostic order, judgment confessed as righteous, and mercies new every morning. Daniel follows, dated to the year. Listen for why the Preacher's words are goads from one Shepherd, and for what the book's structure says about a man whose world has collapsed.
The epilogue commends the Preacher's words before concluding them: he sought to find delightful words and to write words of truth correctly, labor spent so the message would be both pleasing and accurate for the assembly then and the reader now. The words of the wise are like goads, the prods that keep oxen, and students, moving the right way, and the masters of collections like well-driven nails, straight and fit for use. And they are given by one Shepherd: capitalized rightly, Essex holds, for the Shepherd of Israel, Yahweh himself, stands behind the wisdom. Then the seminarian's favorite verse: of making many books there is no end, and much devotion to them wearies the body, in context a dismissal of the ancient world's endless wisdom literature, and by extension of every modern self-help shelf: master this book rather than chasing the others.
When all has been heard: fear God and keep his commandments, for this applies to every person; for God will bring every act to judgment, everything hidden, whether good or evil, and the Preacher's own drumbeat tells when: after death, which every person faces. God has hidden the key to his workings, and that is precisely why all under the sun is vapor to human inquiry; so fear the One who holds the key, live as man and not as your own god, and note where the Preacher sends the reader: to the commandments, back to Torah, the true wise man aligning the wisdom he discovered with the revelation God had already given.
Until the Enlightenment, Judaism and Christianity answered together: Solomon, both as the Preacher and as the frame's writer, third-person self-introduction being no obstacle, with ancient Near Eastern parallels of sages framing their own words; Kaiser and the Bible Knowledge Commentary hold this still. Eaton modifies: the Preacher is Solomon, the frame a later editor preserving him. Liberalism once multiplied voices, a pessimist preacher, an optimist preacher, and a baffled editor, the three-wise-men theory, now largely abandoned even by liberals for two wise men, an anonymous preacher plus a frame-writer, with Delitzsch's famous claim that if Ecclesiastes is not late there is no history of the Hebrew language, a linguistic verdict the last century and a half has overturned. Most prevalent today, in Longman and many others: the frame-writer voices the Preacher as a Solomonic persona, Solomon-like but not Solomon. Essex's anchor is 1:2 with 1:1: the words of the Preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem, joined to wisdom credentials that fit no later Davidic king; on the text's own claim, taken with inerrancy, the Preacher is Solomon, and whether Solomon or a second wise man supplied the frame is a battle that can wait for heaven.
Three accounts of the book's aim. The old Scofield Reference Bible made it purely negative: the futility of human wisdom, the best the man under the sun can do, a foil for the rest of Scripture; but the epilogue itself says the Preacher gave words of truth, and fear God stands inside the message at chapter 5, so the book claims to deliver godly wisdom, not merely to expose its absence. Kaiser championed the positive reading against the Ecclesiastes-gainsayers, and Provan follows: the book is a revelation of godly wisdom. The majority mediates: the futility of human wisdom displayed so that the reader responds to God's wisdom, and the book's own double use of wisdom supports the distinction: I set my mind to explore by wisdom, the under-the-sun pursuit that yields only grief, for in much wisdom is much grief; against the wisdom that excels folly as light excels darkness, itself partial, for even the wisest man is not God. Essex's verdict on the whole: read whole, as wisdom books must be, the thrust is positive, godly wisdom, with unblinking realism about the futility along the way.
Following David Dorsey's structural work, Essex commends an unusual method for this one book: read the conclusion first, for the Preacher is the best interpreter of the Preacher. With fear God and keep his commandments in hand, the shape appears: the frame of title and epilogue; the poem on life's brevity in 1:2 to 11 answered by the brevity poems of 11:7 to 12:8, rejoice while you can, for, against every commencement address, the individual's worst days lie ahead as decay does its work, Essex offering his own wall at fifty-five as evidence, so burn the midnight oil while young, before the midnight oil burns you; wisdom's limits in 1:12 to 2:26 answered by the poem on time in chapter 7; the time-bound creature of chapter 3; and around the center, the standing problems of the fallen world, injustice, oppression, suffering, unchanged generation to generation because fallen men inhabit a cursed earth, and the freeway on the way home from church supplies the proof. At the center stands 5:1 to 7: guard your steps at the house of God, let your words be few, rather, fear God. God has set eternity in the heart; there is more than this world, and the knowledge of it belongs to God: let God be God, and as man, fear him, keep his commandments, and trust him to right the wrongs.
Like Job, Ecclesiastes preaches best in one message, because fragments discourage: preach 4:1 to 6 on oppression without the conclusion and the congregation sees the problem with no answer. A measure of godly sorrow is intended, the sense of futility that throws a person wholly on God, but the book's end is livable wisdom: accept the world as cursed by sin beyond your repair, receive your life and your work as given by God, rejoice in them, and trust and obey even where you cannot see why. The book meets the postmodern mood exactly, a world that cannot be figured out, which is why, as Kaiser notes, it has become the favorite biblical book of college students across North America and Europe; but where postmodernism answers absurdity with self-actualization, make your own truth, Ecclesiastes answers that the design is God's, and defying it ends the way defying gravity does. And it liberates: the reader delivered from the endless shelf of self-help, holding instead the one book whose wisdom is from the one Shepherd.
Three of its chapters open with the Hebrew Ekah, How: how lonely sits the city, and the Masoretic tradition titled the book by that first word, an exclamation rather than a question, not why has this happened but oh, what has happened. The Talmud calls the book Lamentations and, reflecting the earliest tradition, ties it to Jeremiah; the Septuagint and Vulgate titled it for its tears. The text itself is anonymous, but its subject is beyond dispute: the destruction of Jerusalem, and since AD 70 is too late on every dating, the destruction of 586 BC, with the author writing as one who has seen it, close to the event, not centuries after. Canonically it follows Ecclesiastes' wisdom for the fallen world with the fallen world's hardest scene: the righteous man amid unrighteous Judah, watching the city burn; and among the festival scrolls it was read year by year in remembrance of the August 586 destruction.
The city is personified: she weeps bitterly in the night, her adversaries have become her masters, then speaks in her own voice, I have rebelled, and the author is one with her: I am the man who has seen affliction because of the rod of his wrath. But this is no Job-like mystery: the book says plainly that the judgment came from Yahweh, for the multitude of her transgressions, on the day of his fierce anger, and just as plainly that Yahweh is righteous, for I have rebelled against his command. The sin is generational and culminating, our fathers sinned and are no more, and it is we who have borne their iniquities; the enemy's gloating is noted and handed to God in imprecation, deal with them as you have dealt with me. And at the book's heart stands the confession that has fed the church ever since: the Lord's lovingkindnesses never cease, his compassions never fail, hesed and faithfulness surviving the ashes, which is why the book can end in prayer: restore us to you, O Lord, that we may be restored; renew our days as of old. The purpose: Yahweh's servant lamented Jerusalem's destruction, caused by Judah's sin, in repentance and in hope of restoration, speaking for the righteous remnant.
The book's most astonishing feature, noted by commentators of every persuasion: a man in the deepest emotional turmoil has produced one of the most orderly books in the Old Testament. The first four chapters move in the limping lament meter, three beats then two; chapters 1, 2, and 4 are acrostics, twenty-two verses each walking the Hebrew alphabet; chapter 3 intensifies the device, sixty-six verses with every three successive verses sharing a letter; and chapter 5, no longer acrostic, still holds to twenty-two verses. Thematically the chapters mirror: the desolation of chapter 1 answered by the prayer for restoration in chapter 5, the Lord's punishment in chapter 2 answered by his wrath detailed in chapter 4, and at the center chapter 3, the most personal chapter, the author's own grief and his hope. Your world has fallen apart, and the book is perfectly structured: the discipline itself is part of the testimony.
The one live interpretive issue is authorship. Liberal criticism divides the book among sources, chapter 3's individual voice assigned to a different hand, and Ellison in the Expositor's Bible Commentary is the rare evangelical nearby, giving chapter 3 to Jeremiah and the rest to anonymous writers. Most evangelicals, and many liberals now, read a single author; House and Harrison stop there, an anonymous unity, and since the text names no one, that restraint denies no doctrine. But the implications point further: the author is an eyewitness of the destruction whose themes and very terminology echo one canonical book above all, Jeremiah; Jewish tradition has named Jeremiah as far back as tradition reaches, picturing him on the Mount of Olives overlooking the ruin; and Keil, Huey, and the Bible Knowledge Commentary concur. Essex holds the classic position: he sounds like Jeremiah, speaks like Jeremiah, sees what Jeremiah sees. Why then no name? The Spirit did not lead him to give it, and the anonymity serves the book's office: not Jeremiah's private grief but the voice of the righteous remnant in every generation, grieving what sin required God to do, and holding, with 5:19, to the Lord who reigns forever.
Essex's candor: in all his years of ministry he has never preached Lamentations, and he is in large company, for good expositions scarcely exist, House's brand-new Word Biblical Commentary being the first major evangelical commentary on the book, with Harrison and Huey serving from their Jeremiah volumes, and Francis Schaeffer's Death in the City a late-sixties application rather than an exegesis. Yet the book deserves at least one message, or five along its five-chapter structure: God takes sin seriously, and here is the human realization of what sin's judgment is. The needed background is brief: Jeremiah's forty years of repent-or-else, Deuteronomy 28's culminating curse refused, and now the prophet seeing the judgment he preached; and the application reaches forward, for even those who hold the book of Revelation will be stunned when the prophesied judgments actually fall.
The final book of the course carries its own chronology: from the third year of Jehoiakim, 605 BC, when Daniel was carried to Babylon, through the third year of Cyrus, 536 BC, the last vision, with the lions' den about a year earlier and chapter 5 pinned to the very night Babylon fell to the Persians. Daniel was a young man at the deportation, roughly fifteen, somewhere between twelve and eighteen; plot the dates and he is about eighty-three in the lions' den, an old man in what the book implies is retirement by chapter 5, decades after serving as counselor through the whole of Nebuchadnezzar's long reign.
The chart preaches. Scripture records Daniel's faithfulness as a teenager, chapters 1 through 3, and God's use of him as a senior citizen, visions and testimony into his mid-eighties, and tells almost nothing of his prime, the decades of competent service in between. So much for the assumption that God cannot use the very young or the very old: the teenager stood for God in Babylon, and the old man came out of retirement and did considerably more than pray, windows open toward Jerusalem in line with Solomon's dedication prayer. And, Essex adds, I am no liberal: Daniel wrote Daniel, which means the book was penned by a man in his mid-eighties at least, so your best book may still be ahead of you; keep preaching, keep teaching, be faithful to the end, like Daniel.
Each opens the chapter in your ESV app or on esv.org.
Tap an answer. A wrong guess points you back to the outline; when all twenty-four are right, the lecture is marked complete on this device.
1. What do the epilogue's goads and well-driven nails picture?
2. Who is the one Shepherd of Ecclesiastes 12:11, on Essex's reading?
3. What does the warning about making many books mean in context?
4. When will God bring every act to judgment, per the Preacher's own drumbeat?
5. Where does the Preacher send the reader by concluding with the commandments?
6. What was the three-wise-men theory of authorship?
7. Why does Essex hold that the Preacher must be Solomon?
8. What overturned Delitzsch's late-date argument from the book's language?
9. What defeats the purely negative reading of the book's purpose?
10. How does the book use wisdom in two different senses?
11. Why read Ecclesiastes from the conclusion inward?
12. What stands at the structural center of the book?
13. How does Ecclesiastes answer the postmodern response to absurdity?
14. What does the Hebrew title Ekah express?
15. Why must the destruction in view be 586 BC?
16. What separates Lamentations from a Job-like mystery of suffering?
17. What confession stands at the heart of chapter 3?
18. What is astonishing about the book's form?
19. How do the chapters mirror one another?
20. What is Essex's case for Jeremiah as the author?
21. Why does the book's anonymity serve its purpose?
22. What background suffices for preaching Lamentations?
23. What do Daniel's dates reveal about his age?
24. What lesson does Essex draw from the silence about Daniel's prime?
All twenty-four correct. Lecture 27 is complete.
The Preacher's words are goads, meant to sting you into the right path. Where has Ecclesiastes actually goaded you this week, and where have you managed to read it without letting it prod anything?
Of making many books there is no end. What does your own intake of advice, feeds, podcasts, and self-help amount to, and what would mastering the one book instead look like in practice?
Essex says, against every commencement address, that the individual's worst days lie ahead as decay does its work, and still commands rejoicing. How do you hold realism about aging and loss together with commanded joy?
Lamentations grieves in perfect acrostic order: total honesty inside total discipline. What do you make of ordered grief, and how might form, written prayers, laments, structure, serve you in your own losses?
Daniel was faithful at fifteen and mighty at eighty-three, with his prime passed over in silence. Which season of life have you quietly written off, in yourself or in others, and what does Daniel's chart say to that?
Lamentations 3:22
Read Ecclesiastes 12 slowly, then chapter 5:1 to 7 as the book's center, and reread chapters 1 and 2 with the conclusion in hand. Read Lamentations 1, 3, and 5, watching the city become an I and the grief become a prayer. Read Daniel 1 and 6, marking the ages at each end. Next session: the book of Daniel, its history, visions, and interpretive questions, and the course's end.