Ecclesiastes 4:5: “The fool folded his hands together and eats his own flesh.”

I don’t know about you but I find the English translation of this verse to be a bit creepy. Still I suppose I should start  with the literal interpretation of this passage. Most our commentaries tend to agree that the writer is basically talking about people who feel the world owes them a living.   They sit back in their laziness and eat their own flesh, an obvious Hebraic idiom which your commentaries will tell you is a reference to self-tormentors, people who are never really satisfied.  I can see that in this verse, but when you look at it in the Hebrew you find there is more.

The first word is fool. This is kasal in Hebrew and does mean to be foolish but this is a foolishness which is bred from a refusal to look beyond your own understanding.  The word is spelled Kap, Samek and Lamed.    The Kap can represent arrogance, willfulness, and becoming a tyrant.  The Samek could show a blocking off or shutting down.   The Lamed would represent narrow mindedness and bookishness.  In other words, this fool is one who will not accept advice or counsel, he just shuts down and dwells on his own understanding of events. I would hesitate to use the word fool in our modern context as that has such a wide range of meaning for us although it could be applied in the narrow sense of someone who is foolish in the sense that he is too easily discouraged.

He folds his hands.  Commentators say that this is an expression for laziness. But there are other options. I tend to think the writer is referring to a person who is going through a difficult time and just giving up. Someone who is so discouraged he will no longer lift a hand to get himself out of a situation.   He refuses to look at the positive side, he is totally pessimistic and convinced that disaster and tragedy lies ahead and will not raise a finger to do anything about it.  Sort of the Eeyore type from Winnie the Pooh, pessimistic and gloomy.  Such a person is a self-tormentor.

Such a person is the one who may say: “It is no use, I can’t find a job (lose weight, give a speech,  finish my education etc.), so I will just give up and not try.”  Such a person who gives up is called a kasal, well maybe in this sense the word fool is a good English word to use.  Do you have  better word for such a person. I would like to think of a better word because I fear I may be such a kasal.

I know in the past few years I have given up a number of times. The only problem is that I can’t really figure out what exactly this giving up entailsand how is it manifested?   Now to take a look at this last expression eats his own flesh.  Commentators say this means self-tormenting,. I am a little uneasy about this,  I wonder if self-tormenting is all the writer really had in mind.   The word for flesh is besar which  is more of a reference to your inward parts than it is to the flesh. The word for eat is ’akal which means to consume, or devour.

I don’t mean to give the impression that I am not opposed to commentaries,  I use commentaries and encourage others to use them as well,  but the danger is that we can limit ourselves to commentaries and not open ourselves up to further revelation by the Spirit of God.   For one thing commentators are people just like us, who is to say they have a final word on a passage of Scripture.  Who is to say that God will not allow for various shades of interpretations to fit our needs?

I feel God has a message in this passage for me, but if I limit myself to commentaries, I will not find any message that would apply to myself.  However, if I allow myself to just step out of the box a little, I find God addressing me at the very root of my problem.

As I look at that final phrase, eat their own flesh” I find if I were to substitute a secondary meaning of the word for eat and use the word consume or devour  and use the secondary meaning of inward parts instead of flesh, I begin to get a better picture of something else that God may want me to reveal, something I might find easier to relate to. The giving up is not so much just not doing anything at all, but allowing it to consume your inward parts.

Sometimes we look at our personal situation and see only doom and gloom ahead.  Not that we have given up, we are still in the ring punching it out, but our heart and soul are no longer in the fight and that is pretty much the same as giving up only you just keep getting punched out.  You’ve already admitted defeat in your heart and you are just waiting for that knockout punch.  In the mean time you continue to let the enemy beat up on you while you just sit with your hands folded taking the beating or eating your own flesh.  In other words you just sit back and worry and fret, letting your blood pressure rise, your blood sugar to spike and your stomach  develop ulcers,  in other words letting your inward parts consume you.

There is a word in the Hebrew, savar which is sometimes rendered as hope.  It means to wait or spend time to examine something.  The word is spelled  Shin, Beth and Resh.    These letters suggest that hope means you have a practice of  being satisfied with the Holy Spirit finding a home in your heart.  How easily we forget that our bodies are a temple of the Holy Spirit and if our boat sinks, He will be right in there treading water with us.  If we have the very living, loving life of Jesus Christ in us, the power of the Holy Spirit in us, what better definition  can we give for hope.

I researched the word imagination in the Old Testament and found that is it always used in a negative sense.  I personally believe that savar hope can also be translated as imagination but more specifically a positive imagination.   Hope is a positive imagination.  Thus, Ecclesiastes 4:5 tells us that if we just fold our hands and dwell on the doom and gloom that is what we will get on a natural level.  But if we savar or imagine things positive, hope  then because of the God that lives inside of us, no matter what happens, we can rest assured that spiritually, only good things will take place.