Ecclesiastes 11 — Sow in the Morning

Bread on the water (11:1–2)

Chapter 11 turns a corner. For ten chapters Qoheleth has been the great looker — watching, testing, weighing, reporting what he found under the sun and refusing to sweeten it. Now, at last, he tells us what to do about it. And the shape of his counsel is strange. He moves in three beats — give it away, sow it anyway, rejoice in it now — and under all three runs the same refrain, the refrain of this whole book: we do not know. Some form of it sounds in nearly every verse of the first half. His advice is not built on knowledge. It is built on the honest absence of it.

He begins with bread and water. "Cast your bread on the waters; for you shall find it after many days." The Hebrew is shallach lachmecha — literally send out your bread: let it go, put it beyond reach. Two readings have always contended here, and both are good. The first is commerce — bread means goods, the waters mean the sea, and this is a merchant watching his cargo sail past the harbor mouth: capital ventured, return uncertain, "after many days." The second is generosity — bread means bread, and this is charity flung out to the hungry with no receipt and no expectation, an act so unbusinesslike it looks like throwing food in a river. Ancient readers heard the second almost unanimously. Gregory Thaumaturgus, paraphrasing the book in the third century, put it plainly: it is right "to give (to the needy) of your bread… For though you seem immediately to waste it upon some persons, as if you cast your bread upon the water, yet in the progress of time your kindness shall be seen to be not unprofitable for you."^*

We do not have to choose. Both readings do the same work, and it is the work of the whole chapter: let it go before we know how it turns out. Verse 2 confirms it — "Give a portion to seven, yes, even to eight" — spread it around, hold nothing back in a single closed fist — and then gives the reason, which is not optimism at all: "for you don't know what evil will be on the earth." This is not the confidence of a man who expects things to go well. It is the counsel of a man who knows they might not, and who draws the surprising conclusion that the right response to an unpredictable world is not hoarding but open-handedness. The clenched fist is the natural posture of the frightened. Qoheleth says: open it.

The tree lies where it falls (11:3)

Then a verse that seems to say the opposite. "If the clouds are full of rain, they empty themselves on the earth; and if a tree falls toward the south, or toward the north, in the place where the tree falls, there shall it be."

Two pictures, one point. Full clouds rain — that is simply what they do, and nobody consults us about it. A falling tree lands where it lands, and there it stays. Some of what happens to us is weather: it arrives, it is not negotiable, and the tree does not get up again.

Set this beside verses 1–2 and the tension is the argument. He has just told us to act; now he tells us how little of the outcome is ours. Both are true at once. The world is largely out of our hands — and our hands are not therefore excused.

The man who watches the wind (11:4–6)

Which is exactly where verse 4 lands its blow. "He who observes the wind won't sow; and he who regards the clouds won't reap."

Here is a man who has understood verse 3 and drawn precisely the wrong conclusion from it. He knows the weather rules the harvest, and so he studies the weather. He stands at the edge of the field with a wet finger in the air, waiting for the conditions to be certain before he will commit the seed. And the sentence closes on him like a trap: he never sows. Not because he is lazy — he is busy; he is observing — but because the certainty he is waiting for is never going to come, and while he waits the season runs out. Gregory saw this one clearly too: there have been those who, "scrutinizing the clouds and waiting for the wind, have had nought to do with reaping and winnowing, putting their trust in vanity."^* It is a portrait of a very respectable paralysis — caution curdled into refusal, and calling itself prudence.

Verse 5 removes the last excuse by making the ignorance total: "As you don't know what is the way of the wind, nor how the bones grow in the womb of her who is with child; even so you don't know the work of God who does all." The Hebrew ruach is doing double duty here, as it does all through this book — it is wind, and it is breath, and it is spirit. We cannot trace the wind; we cannot watch a child being knit together; we cannot audit the work of God. And notice what these two images are: they are not pictures of chaos. They are pictures of hidden, purposeful, life-giving work — the wind we cannot map still blows, the bones we cannot see still grow. The point is not that nothing is happening. It is that something is happening and we are not being shown it.

And therefore — verse 6 — "In the morning sow your seed, and in the evening don't withhold your hand; for you don't know which will prosper, whether this or that, or whether they both will be equally good." The not-knowing that paralyzed the wind-watcher becomes, in the same breath, the reason to work all day long. If we cannot tell which will prosper, then sow both. Ignorance is not a reason to stop. It is a reason to broaden.

Calvin was pressed hard in his own day by people arguing the wind-watcher's case in theological dress — if God has fixed everything, why bother? — and he refused the inference in almost these terms. "The eternal decrees of God," he wrote, "by no means prevent us from proceeding, under his will, to provide for ourselves, and arrange all our affairs"; for "he who has fixed the boundaries of our life, has at the same time entrusted us with the care of it." Then comes the line that could serve as a gloss on verse 6: "God has been pleased to conceal from us all future events that we may prepare for them as doubtful, and cease not to apply the provided remedies until they have either been overcome, or have proved too much for all our care."^* Not knowing is not an oversight God failed to correct. It is the condition under which we were meant to work. Qoheleth never gets that far — he has no doctrine of providence to name here, only the bare fact of the hiddenness — but he has walked us right up to the edge of it. Sow in the morning. Sow in the evening. Because you don't know.

Light is sweet (11:7–8)

Then the tone changes, and something in the chapter opens like a window. "Truly the light is sweet, and it is a pleasant thing for the eyes to see the sun."

It is the plainest, least defended good in the whole book. Not wealth, not wisdom, not legacy — daylight. The sheer sweetness of being alive and able to see. After ten chapters of hard looking, Qoheleth stops and admits that the light is sweet, and for once he does not qualify it. This is the grace-note the book keeps sounding: the enjoyment is real, it comes from the hand of God, and it is not a consolation prize.

But he will not let us settle into it, and verse 8 is why: "Yes, if a man lives many years, let him rejoice in them all; but let him remember the days of darkness, for they shall be many. All that comes is vanity."

It does two things at once, and both are meant. Rejoice in them all — every one of the years, no exceptions; a genuine command to joy. And remember the days of darkness, for they shall be many. He will not let us have the sunlight without the shadow standing in the room. He is not cheering up. He is telling us to rejoice with our eyes open, which is the hardest kind of rejoicing there is.

And we are very bad at it. Pascal, who understood our evasions better than almost anyone, named the maneuver in a single line: "We run carelessly to the precipice, after we have put something before us to prevent us seeing it."^* That is the counterfeit of verse 8 — not joy but diversion: happiness with the darkness carefully screened off, which is not joy at all but management. Qoheleth takes the screen away and still says rejoice. Whether that is actually possible, he does not here say.

Rejoice, young man — and know (11:9–10)

The chapter ends by turning to the young, and the turn is startling. "Rejoice, young man, in your youth, and let your heart cheer you in the days of your youth, and walk in the ways of your heart, and in the sight of your eyes."

We should feel how generous that is. It is not "be careful." It is go — follow your heart, follow your eyes, take the years while you have them. Coming from the man who tested every pleasure available to a king and found the bottom of each one, it is a remarkable thing to say, and he says it without a grudge.

And then, in the same sentence: "but know that for all these things God will bring you into judgment."

Everything depends on how we hear that but. It has often been heard as a trapdoor — the old preacher letting the young man run to the end of his rope before jerking it. Gregory heard it exactly that way, having the old man round on the young: "Senseless are you, my friend, in that you do not look for the judgment that shall come from God upon all these things."^* But there is another way to hear it, and it may be the truer one. Qoheleth's long complaint has been that nothing under the sun finally counts — the wise man and the fool share a grave, the work passes to a stranger, nothing is ever settled. Judgment is the one word that answers that. If God brings every one of these things into judgment, then not one of them is hevel in the sense of pointless. They are all weighed. The young man's years are not vapor blown off the top of a life; they are on the scales. On this hearing, judgment is not the enemy of the command to rejoice. It is what makes the rejoicing matter.

Both hearings are in the verse, and Qoheleth does not disentangle them for us.

Verse 10 closes: "Therefore remove sorrow from your heart, and put away evil from your flesh; for youth and the dawn of life are vanity." The word behind "the dawn of life" is shacharut — from the root for black or dawn, the dark-haired morning of a life — and it carries the last, gentlest sting. Youth is hevel: a breath, a vapor, gone while we are still calling it now.

Augustine, looking back on his own squandered youth from the far side of it, opened Book II of the Confessions like this: "I will now call to mind my past foulness, and the carnal corruptions of my soul; not because I love them, but that I may love Thee, O my God."^* That is exactly the double motion Qoheleth is asking for and cannot quite perform — the years remembered honestly, all the way down, and yet remembered toward someone. Augustine knew what the remembering was for. Qoheleth, here, does not say.

So chapter 11 hands us a life we can actually live: open the fist, sow morning and evening, take the sunlight while it is on our faces, and refuse to stand at the edge of the field waiting for a certainty that is not coming. It is warm, practical, humane counsel, and it is not a retreat from a single thing he has said. Every piece of it rests on the same ground: we do not know.

And that is where it leaves us — with an ache dressed up as advice. Rejoice in all our years, and remember that the dark days will outnumber them. Walk in the ways of our heart, and know that every step of it is going into judgment. He does not tell us how to hold those together. He gives us joy with a shadow lying across it, a judgment we cannot pass, a fistful of seed, and a season running out — and no name for anyone who could make the joy survive the judgment. The chapter is honest enough to want such a person. It is honest enough not to pretend it has found him.

:::pastor An illustration. Most of us have met the man who watches the wind — and most of us have been him. He has a good business plan and has never started the business; the reading list for the degree and no application filed; the letter to his brother written a dozen times in his head and never sent. Ask him and he will say, with real sincerity, that he is waiting for the right moment — and he is not lying, he is simply wrong, because the right moment is the one thing under the sun that never arrives on schedule. What is so disarming about verse 4 is that it does not scold him for recklessness. It scolds him for watching. The seed does not care how carefully we studied the sky; it only asks to be let go of.

From history. The hymn that grew out of this chapter came from a carriage window. In February 1832, riding between Gloucester and Tewkesbury, the hymn-writer James Montgomery saw women and girls stooping in rows across a fresh-turned field and could not make out what they were doing. He described the scene aloud to his travelling companion, Rowland Hodgson — who was blind, and who told him what it was: dibbling, poking holes in lines and dropping two or three grains into each, a thrifty method that saved two-thirds of the seed. Montgomery, delighted and unconvinced, replied that for his part, "give me broadcast sowing, scattering the seed on the right hand and on the left, in liberal handfuls." By the next coaching stage the verses had come. There is something fitting in it — a hymn about sowing what we cannot see the end of, explained to a sighted poet by a blind friend. source

Worth quoting. "Sow in the morn thy seed, / At eve hold not thy hand; / To doubt and fear give thou no heed, / Broadcast it o'er the land." — James Montgomery (1771–1854), "Sow in the Morn Thy Seed," 1832 :::