34 TOWARDS A DYNAMIC UNDERSTANDING OF CHRISTIANITY
The Burden of the Problem Ecclesiastes 3.5a is within the pericope of a strict literary pattern that runs from verse 2 to verse 8 and its literal rendering creates an eyesore effect in the formal and substantial smoothness of the total passage. There is an apparent uniformity within the considered text (vv.2-8) so that each verse has two couplets (or distichs), each couplet having internal antithetic parallelism. Combining it with the other couplet of the same verse creates an external synonymous parallelism that pervades (or must pervade) the entire pericope. In the light of this consideration, we can find a certain degree of difficulty to locate the external synonymous parallelism of the two couplets in verse 5. The second couplet—“a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing” (RSV)—is literally clear and doesn’t call to be considered as figurative. Thus, rendered as such (or with minor functional alteration as in TEV: “the time for kissing and the time for not kissing”), it doesn’t present any serious textual problem at all. If this is the case, how does the first couplet of verse 5 relate to the second? It is with a high degree of justifiable probability that the first part of the verse is hereby taken to be a figurative couplet that needs to be disentangled ot harmoniously fit with the second couplet and into the total literary pattern of the pericope. What then is the meaning of the antithetic couplet “a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stone together”?
Various Interpretations 1. According to the Aramaic Targum, Ecclesiastes 3.5a refers scattering of stones on an old building and preparing to build a new one [Barton 1908, 1947); Eaton (1983);