Ματαιότης in Romans 8 and Ecclesiastes

Does Romans 8 suggest a Pauline interpretation of Qohelet?

I was recently reading through Romans in my morning study time. I noticed that with each successive chapter, I was reading slower and slower. But the time I hit Romans 6, I was getting through less than one chapter a day. At the moment, I’ve been in Romans 8 for several days, and I’ve hit something interesting that I wanted to write down.

I paused on Romans 8:20 -21:

For the creation has been subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself also will be set free from its servility to decay, into the glorious freedom of the children of God

W. Hall Harris III et al., eds., The Lexham English Bible (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2012), Ro 8:20–21.

τῇ γὰρ ματαιότητι ἡ κτίσις ὑπετάγη, οὐχ ἑκοῦσα ἀλλὰ διὰ τὸν ὑποτάξαντα, ἐφʼ ἑλπίδι  21 ὅτι καὶ αὐτὴ ἡ κτίσις ἐλευθερωθήσεται ἀπὸ τῆς δουλείας τῆς φθορᾶς εἰς τὴν ἐλευθερίαν τῆς δόξης τῶν τέκνων τοῦ θεοῦ

Michael W. Holmes, The Greek New Testament: SBL Edition (Lexham Press; Society of Biblical Literature, 2011–2013), Ro 8:20–21.

Surely I’ve had more thoughts about this passage over the years than I can remember. This time though, I was trying to ask some basic questions about the idea of creation being subjected: who subjected it? For what purpose was it subjected? I found my answers and an unexpected (and delightful!) rabbit trail in the commentary of James D.G. Dunn (which I had never read before):

The point Paul is presumably making, through somewhat obscure language, is that God followed the logic of his purposed subjecting of creation to man by subjecting it yet further in consequence of man’s fall, so that it might serve as an appropriate context for fallen man: a futile world to engage the futile mind of man. By describing creation’s subjection as “unwilling” Paul maintains the personification of the previous verse. There is an out-of-sortness, a disjointedness about the created order which makes it a suitable habitation for man at odds with his creator.

By “futility” Paul probably has in mind the same sense of futility of life which found expression in Jewish thought most clearly in Ecclesiastes—that weariness and despair of spirit which cannot see beyond the stultifying repetitiveness of life, the endless cycle of decay and corruption, the worthlessness of a lifelong effort which may be swept away overnight by a storm or be parched to nothingness in a drought, the complete insignificance of the individual in the tides of time and the currents of human affairs—all indeed that, had man but realized it, was going to make it impossible for him to be “as god,” made it inevitable that he would become subservient to useless idols and mere things. Yet for Paul, of course, that is not, could not be the last word.

James D. G. Dunn, Romans 1–8, vol. 38A, Word Biblical Commentary (Dallas: Word, Incorporated, 1988), 487–488.

With my basic questions of comprehension satisfied in the first paragraph, I turned with interest to this idea of “futility”. I had never considered a connection to Ecclesiastes here before, despite my long-term interest in it. As I thought about it, I became excited because I began to wonder if we have a latent New Testament interpretation of Ecclesiastes here. There has been much argument and little consensus in the Christian tradition about the use or application of Ecclesiastes. Is it an accurate view of how things are, with a conclusion that is so orthodox it’s nearly boring ()? Or is it a cautionary tale of what life is like in the world without God (i.e. “under the Sun”)?

Well, before getting to far ahead of myself, I was desiring a concrete linkage between this passage and Ecclesiastes that was perhaps more solid than interpretation of Dunn and my penchant to see an allusion.

ματαιότης is the word for “futility” in verse 20. I hadn’t seen this one before, so I took a quick look at the word family in NIDNTTE:

μάταιος G3469 (mataios), vain, empty, worthless, futile, deceptive; ματαιότης G3470 (mataiotēs), emptiness, futility, worthlessness; ματαιόω G3471 (mataioō), to render futile or worthless; μάτην G3472 (matēn), in vain, to no end; ματαιολογία G3467 (mataiologia), useless talk, empty prattle; ματαιολόγος G3468 (mataiologos), babbling, subst. idle talker

Pretty consistent! Now, in the past, I had become convinced of a translation like “vapor” being best for hebel in the Hebrew text of Ecclesiastes, but something made me wonder how the LXX translated it. So I took a look at the LXX and what did I find?

Ματαιότης ματαιοτήτων, εἶπεν ὁ ἐκκλησιαστής,  ματαιότης ματαιοτήτων, τὰ πάντα ματαιότης.

Henry Barclay Swete, The Old Testament in Greek: According to the Septuagint (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1909), Ec 1:2.

The opening speech of Ecclesiastes (not to mention the rest of it) is chock full of ματαιότης! So I felt better about a connection between the outlook of Ecclesiastes and Paul’s use of ματαιότης in Romans 8. So what does it all mean?

The big thing that came to mind was that in these comments in Romans 8, Paul is talking about an “emplotted” state of affairs, that is the act of creation being subject to futility is not how things originally were or will finally be, but instead it is how they are now at this point in the “story”.

This has potentially big implications for me in my understanding of Ecclesiastes – the very real and resonant way the Qohelet speaks about world is both factual (truthful about how things are) and yet not-as-they-should-be. So, potentially, from Paul’s allusion to it here, we can see that he understood Ecclesiastes to be accurately depicting the world and our experience of it while proclaiming that things will not always be this way. I had never noticed this before, but it fits well with what I understand Paul to be saying up to this point in Romans.

Conclusions? Well, I’m interested to find out what might be in the tradition about the connection here. This has also made me a bit curious about what the concrete criteria might be to declare an allusion. I would guess that use of a word isn’t enough on its own, but in this case there is the lexical link and a thematic “kinship”.