Tag: Ozymandius

Is there anything new under the sun? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

Ecclesiastes starts in a way that seems strange to us, beyond the meaningless aspect. Let’s see what the Teacher says next.

What does man gain by all the toil
at which he toils under the sun?
⁴ A generation goes, and a generation comes,
but the earth remains forever.
⁵ The sun rises, and the sun goes down,
and hastens to the place where it rises.
⁶ The wind blows to the south
and goes around to the north;
around and around goes the wind,
and on its circuits the wind returns.
⁷ All streams run to the sea,
but the sea is not full;
to the place where the streams flow,
there they flow again.
⁸ All things are full of weariness;
a man cannot utter it;
the eye is not satisfied with seeing,
nor the ear filled with hearing.
⁹ What has been is what will be,
and what has been done is what will be done,
and there is nothing new under the sun.
¹⁰ Is there a thing of which it is said,
“See, this is new”?
It has been already
in the ages before us.
¹¹ There is no remembrance of former things,
nor will there be any remembrance
of later things yet to be
among those who come after.

Some readers might be confused wondering “How can the Teacher say there is nothing new under the sun?” We especially wonder about this. After all, we live in an age of invention where there is something new practically every time you turn around. We do things today that if science fiction had existed in the Biblical times would have been considered such. We do some things that were considered science fiction in the 20th century.

The Teacher says that the work a man does is useless. Why? We will see more on this as we go along. However, to answer the question about anything new, the Teacher is talking about nature. He describes the way of what we call science today on how the sun rises and sets, the wind blows, and the rivers flow. Such happened thousands of years ago and unless Christ returns, they will do so one thousand years from now as well. Science itself depends on the regularity.

And as for generations, we can say that yes, we have history, but so did they and how many people today do not know their history? In my Dad’s age, the Beatles were the big phenomenon, yet just recently I had someone tell me they did not know who they were until high school. If we do not know the popular history, how much more do we not know the real significant history? When you read something like the Federalist Papers, our founders put us to shame. They knew about ancient Greek and Roman battles and people and events. They assumed we do as well.

We don’t.

In a sense, the Teacher says we have the whole same-old, same-old going on. A man can do something great and then be forgotten about by the next generation.

Consider the poem, Ozymandius:

I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”