The Sense of Time in Qoheleth 3,11

Abstract

The human being today, drowned by consumption and at the same time suffocated by agendas filled with activities and demands, tends to avoid discerning within himself the fragility of his existence and confronting them with his impulses and desires. Profound intuitions that come from the innermost part of the heart are often ignored, and it is these intuitions that awaken the desire for God, generally because of an apparent lack of time, or rather, because God is seen as a loss of time. In the book of Qoheleth, among the many themes and issues that illuminate human existence, a challenge is presented to the contemporary reader in 3:11: What did God place in the human heart? This is a mysterious crux interpretum, and it is not easy for readers to elucidate and interpret what the given thing was. Like the wise man, we set out to investigate (cf. Qo 1:13) in detail these words of 3:11 to revisit them and rethink the meaning of time.