To everything there is a season

“Turn! Turn! Turn!” is the name of the song by the Byrds that became an international hit in 1965. It is about transience and constant change. The music to the song was written by Pete Seeger in 1959. He borrowed the text—with the exception of seven words—from the Book of Ecclesiastes, as found in King James Version of the Bible. Ecclesiastes is also known as Kohelet.

A poem that almost everyone knows

“All is vanity” is the leitmotif of Ecclesiastes, which is part of the wisdom literature of the Old Testament. The Hebrew word for “vanity”, hevel, appears twenty-two times in this book. It means breath, vapour, or nothingness. And Readers of the Bible are familiar with the term from much further back as a proper name: Abel.

The first eight verses of chapter three of Ecclesiastes revolve around another specific form of impermanence, namely temporality. The poem, which the pop musicians used, is so famous that most people recognise it as soon as they hear it: “To everything there is a season.”

A claim to completeness

The piece is eight verses long. The first verse puts forward a hypothesis: there is an appointed time for every human activity and experience. The other seven verses illustrate and prove this using numerous examples. Each of these seven verses convey four aspects, each with two pairs of opposites. For example: a time to get and a time to lose; a time to keep and a time to cast away.

This structure is based on a threefold claim to completeness: similar to the Chinese yin and yang, the Hebrew pairs of opposites also represent a whole. The number four covers the full number of cardinal directions. And seven represents completeness: from the seven days of the creation narrative to the seven churches or seals of Revelation.

Always a little further

Those who delve a little deeper into the poem will discover some fascinating things. The first verse makes reference to two aspects of time (time and season). The first refers to the point in time and the second to the duration.

The seven explanatory verses also use such shifts in meaning. They repeat what has been said, but go a little further. This is clearly seen in verse four: weeping intensifies to grief, and laughter turns to dancing.

Unanswered questions

However, there are some verses that pose a headache for interpreters. For example, how do “a time to rend, and a time to sew” in verse seven, tie up with “a time to keep silence, and a time to speak”? Could this be about mourning? Not very likely, because verse four has already covered this aspect. Or could verse 7 be about fostering relations?

Verse five could be tricky. In casting away stones and gathering stones, exegetes recognise all kinds of things, from field work to warfare. The Midrash, the oldest form of Bible interpretation using a rabbinic mode of interpretation, has long since provided an answer: ‌“casting away stones” is a euphimism for sexual union. This would then correspond perfectly with the word “embrace” from the same verse.

The cycle of time

“That which hath been is now; and that which is to be hath already been; and God requireth that which is past.” This is how the passage, which began with “To everything there is a season”, ends. Everything passes and everything returns.

But you cannot have everything all at once, but everything in due course. Those who do not keep up with the times as prescribed by God, risk being out of step with the times.

It is crucial that we realise that everything that human beings do on earth and what they experience in the natural world is transient. Eternal things exist only with the Eternal One. It is time that we occupy ourselves with them—always.

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