There is another fact about Ecclesiastes that some forget, namely that the subject of death in the book was written from an ancient Jewish perspective and not reflective of any type of implied Christology.
As such it was reflecting the Jewish view of death at the time it was written. Divine revelation had not progressed to the point of any type of experience of consciousness for the dead, and Jewish schools of thought regarding an afterlife (Olam Ha-Ba) are considered to be of the Talmudic period, after Torah/Tanakh (the Old Testament) was written. Protestants who thus demand one sticks to Old Testament statements like that in Ecclesiastes as “the standard” for Jewish faith about death before Christ are outright uneducated or outright lying. Eschatology continued to progress in their tradition after these books were composed and eventually became a major reason for the contention between the Sadducees and the Pharisees (the Sadducees did not believe in Tradition like Catholicism and the rest of Judaism, only in what was literally written).–Acts 23:7, 8, Matthew 22:23.
And since modern Judaism comes from the Pharisee movement (the Sadducee sect came to an end with the destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E.), the interpretation of Scripture that enlightened the first century Christians like the apostle Paul (Acts 23:6) was that Ecclesiastes was not the last and final word about death.
If a person believes Ecclesiastes is supposed to be the final word about death, how do they account for the Pharisees coming to believe in life after death by the time Jesus came on the scene? The Pharisees were the ones who accepted Ecclesiastes as canonical, whereas the Sadducees who believed only in the five books of Moses and who did not accept Ecclesiastes (and thus rejected this text) believed that those who died were conscious of nothing at all.
This is a good description of what the Old Testament Jews, especially during the time that Ecclesiastes was written, believed.
Basically, these Jews were thinking of Death as it would be if God did not intervene: Sheol, the Old Testament abode of the dead, was a fate where you were considered to be a “shade” of yourself…you technically still existed (witness, in the book of Samuel, that the Prophet Samuel is at one point consulted after death by Solomon, providing an OT basis for believing that the soul never ceased existing) but with very rare exceptions (such as my parenthetical comment) it was believed that, without a body, your soul had no way of really interacting with the world, and this included having memories and thoughts. Basically, death seems to have been looked at as being similar to a permanent coma: The person hasn’t ceased to exist, and therefore the person probably experiences existence on some indescribably minimal level, but the person has no thoughts, no memories, no knowledge.
And when you think of it, this was a very sensible belief, before Divine Revelation slowly revealed more: After all, without Divine Intervention to give the souls of the dead some means of gathering knowledge, memories, etc. despite the loss of their ordinary means of doing so (the human brain), it makes sense to believe that they would still continue existing but would “know nothing.” We Christians know that–whether this has always been true or whether it only became [universally] true after Christ’s coming–the souls do indeed have intelligence, thought, and the ability to act, but at a certain point in Old Testament times, the Jews had no way of knowing this…
…that is if, in fact, it was even true at that time, aside from certain exceptions such as Moses, Abraham, etc. as explicitly noted in the NT. I myself don’t know how things worked before Christ’s coming–I have often suspected that this “Sheol” fate, and not only Hell, WAS one of the things from which Christ saved us, and if that’s true, people like Ecclesiastes were essentially correct…at
that time. Either way, whether it was correct then or not, it’s certainly not correct now. And that’s the important thing.
Blessings in Christ,
KindredSoul
Anything that is “Catholic” he is against but its cool to talk to your dead grandmother? lol