Who bent the world?

Q has a back story that he allows to appear gradually throughout the book of Ecclesiastes. It is more blatant towards the end, but a careful read discovers hints. For example he says that it is a grievous task that God (interestingly Elohim) has given to the sons of men (1.13), thus turning the flow of his thought from a human perspective as though we initiate the question What does life mean? to some sense of an assignment from God to us that we find grievous. We tend, if we have some sense of deity, to pose questions like "why?" to this being. Whereas here Q may be proposing that it is God who is posing the questions. Later he says that God has been testing humans (3.18) And when he turns his thoughts to pleasure as a candidate for the answer to the question What does life mean? and we expect him to "test" pleasure (expecting that this is his method for all candidates) he surprises us with "I said to myself 'come now, I will test you with pleasure." (2.1) It's as though he speaks for God rather than question God, and this is further exasperated by his assertion that "what is crooked cannot be straightened" (1.15) and "Consider the work of God, for who can straighten what He has bent?" 97.13) What sense can we make of this?

the Wisdom of Q

What does life mean? This is the searching question posed by Qoheleth in the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes. The Message version calls the author "the Quester."It seems to me that the most important question to be asked in this world is this timeless one. How would you answer?  Q says that with a brilliant mind and great wisdom he (presumably) presses various "pretenders" to show that they are the answer to the question. But none of them escapes his scrutinizing reaction "ha! like chasing the wind." Worse, in the Message the paraphrase is "like spitting into the wind." This is even more insulting than trying to chase or grasp the wind - it involves the mockery that returns at the end of the pursuit. It seems to me that the effect of the "Fall" - the brokenness of our world, which seems much like a roof caved in by our own doing and the wreckage falling randomly on and around us, is experienced differently by different people in different times. But perhaps the most common experience of that wreckage is a profound sense of meaninglessness in our lives. And how do we manage this? We tend to live deliberately unexamined lives. We choose an agnostic option that we perhaps have not been offered that mentions the possibility of god but feels no obligation for the integration of that possibility towards a meaningful existence. Q wants to talk!