Solomon Tried to Out-Think Kohelet and Broke

Most people read Kohelet as world-weary poetry. The rabbis of Midrash Rabbah read it as a confession. Solomon, the wisest man who ever lived, sat down at the end of his life and admitted that the thing God had given him to do was a trap he could not stop walking into.

The verse is (Ecclesiastes 1:13). "I applied my heart to seek and to search in wisdom, regarding everything that is performed beneath the heavens. It is an unfortunate matter that God has given to the sons of men in which to engage." An unfortunate matter. Said by the king whose name became a synonym for wisdom. Kohelet Rabbah, compiled in eighth-century Palestine as a running commentary on Ecclesiastes, asks the only question that matters here. What is the unfortunate matter? What did Solomon catch himself doing that he could not forgive?

The king who could not stop searching

The Hebrew word the rabbis seize on is latur, to search, the same verb the Torah uses for the scouts Moses sent into Canaan. Solomon, according to Kohelet Rabbah 13:1, scouted wisdom the way Joshua's men scouted hills. He set aside hours. He moved from teacher to teacher. One rabbi for Bible, another for Mishnah, a third for the right way to sweeten mustard and lupine, a fourth for the exact temperature at which a hot drink should be served. Nothing was too small.

The midrash points to (I Kings 5:12), which says his songs were one thousand and five. Other poets, the rabbis say, stop when the alphabet ends. Solomon kept going. He added five more letters past the alef-bet, past the system itself. The image is of a mind that cannot find a wall it can rest against.

The matter God gave us, in his own voice

A parallel passage, Kohelet Rabbah 10:1, runs the same question through different sages and arrives somewhere darker. Rabbi Yudan, quoting Rabbi Aivu, names it plainly. The matter God has given us to engage in is the chase after property. "A person does not leave the world having achieved even half of his desire. If he has one hundred, he wants two hundred. If he has two hundred, he wants four hundred." That is not a moral observation. That is a diagnosis of a species. We die mid-arithmetic.

Rabbi Yohanan goes further. The chase after property, once it slides into ill-gotten gain, is the worst of the sins. He pictures a sin-measure, a se'a heaped with every transgression, idolatry and forbidden relationships and bloodshed all crammed in. The sin that prosecutes first, the one whose voice reaches heaven before the others, is robbery. (Amos 9:1) says God will "shatter the head of all of them," and the rabbis hear in the Hebrew uvtza'am the word betza, ill-gotten gain. It is the robbery that breaks the head, not the idolatry.

The Torah you forget on purpose

Then Rabbi Abbahu turns the knife inward. Maybe the unfortunate matter is not money at all. Maybe it is Torah. We study, and we forget. We sit with a page for a year and three weeks later we cannot remember the argument that moved us. He says this with a sigh you can hear across fifteen centuries.

The reply, from Rabbi Yitzhak, is one of the strangest consolations in rabbinic literature. The forgetting, he says, is the gift. If you remembered everything, you would learn a tractate once and walk away. You would treat Torah the way Solomon treated mustard and lupine, a problem you have solved, a flavor you have mastered. Because you forget, you come back. Because you come back, you keep being shaped. The leak in the bucket is the reason you keep going to the well.

Wisdom and the ten rulers inside you

The third strand of the cluster, Kohelet Rabbah 19:1, reads (Ecclesiastes 7:19), "Wisdom will bolster the wise more than ten rulers who are in a city." The rabbis hear two readings at once. In the first, wisdom is God, and the ten rulers are the ten utterances by which God spoke the world into existence. Stunning thought. People will recognize God faster through the line of an argument than through the fact of the sky. Torah, the rabbis insist, is a more direct road to the Creator than creation itself.

The second reading is the one that closes the circle. Wisdom is Adam, the first human, called in (Ezekiel 28:12) "the culmination of perfection, full of wisdom." The ten rulers are the ten organs serving the neshamah (נשמה), the soul. Esophagus, trachea, liver, gall bladder, lungs, stomach, spleen, kidneys, heart, tongue. Each one has a portfolio. The liver carries wrath. The gall bladder, envy. The kidneys whisper counsel. The heart understands. The tongue speaks. Wisdom rules them all, or it does not, and a person is either governed from above or run by the parliament of his own organs.

What Solomon was actually confessing

Stack the three passages and you see what Kohelet Rabbah is doing with the old king. Solomon was the man who had everything, and he kept searching past the alphabet. The midrash refuses to flatter him. The pursuit of more, whether the more is money or knowledge or mastery over the temperature of a drink, is the unfortunate matter God gave human beings to chew on. The wise are not the ones who escape it. The wise are the ones who notice the gall bladder filling with envy and the liver going hot, and who let wisdom sit in the chair at the head of the room.

The last image the cluster leaves is small and physical. A man learning a page of Torah, forgetting it by Tuesday, opening the book again on Wednesday. Solomon, with his thousand and five songs, never found a wall to lean against. The student who keeps forgetting has one. The book is still on the table.