A Time for Everything
ALREADY ANSWERED · ALREADY QUOTED · No. 4
Where the saying comes from, and what the rest of the passage says
In May the Library of Congress added The Byrds' recording of "Turn! Turn! Turn!" to the National Recording Registry, which is the shelf this country keeps for recordings it does not intend to lose. The song went to number one in 1965. Almost every word of it is Scripture, and almost nobody noticed.
I was reminded of this at a red light a few weeks ago. The car beside me had its windows down and an oldies station on, and the man driving was singing every word of it, badly and with total commitment, the way people sing when they think the light is longer than it is. He was quoting the Book of Ecclesiastes in traffic.
This one has been on my list a long time. You knew it by heart. You never knew whose.
Pete Seeger wrote the song in 1959. He took it from the third chapter of Ecclesiastes, the first eight verses, and he did not adapt them so much as copy them out. Here is how the chapter opens in the Catholic Bible: "There is an appointed time for everything, and a time for every affair under the heavens."
What follows is the part everyone can hum, the long list of paired seasons. Though the most famous line in it is not quite what a Catholic reads today. The King James has "a time to be born," which is easier to sing and is the version three generations of us are carrying around. The rendering I read is blunter about who is doing the work: "A time to give birth, and a time to die."
The poem is also darker than the melody lets on, and Seeger did not soften it. The chapter makes room for killing, for hating, for tearing down, for war. He left all of it in, which means the song that became a peace anthem carries every violent line the chapter has.
So the question is not what Seeger cut. He cut almost nothing.
The question is what he added. Two things. The title, which is his. And one line at the very end, after the last pair, war and peace. The song closes on a promise that it is not too late. Six words, and apart from the title, the only ones in the song that nobody in the Bible wrote.
Here is what the chapter says instead, three verses past where the song stops. "God has made everything appropriate to its time, but has put the timeless into their hearts so they cannot find out, from beginning to end, the work which God has done."
Read that twice. There is a right time for every one of those seasons, and you can feel that there is, and you will not be shown the schedule. The ache to see the whole shape of your life was put there on purpose. So was your inability to see it.
What Ecclesiastes says is harder than what Seeger added, and I have come to think it is more useful. A promise like his can turn out to be wrong. It gets said at hospital beds and over caskets and it is sometimes simply not true. Ecclesiastes offers no guarantee about your timing. What it claims is that there is timing at all, that the seasons are not random noise. And it explains the restlessness: you cannot stop wanting to see the pattern because something put the wanting there.
I spent years certain I had missed my window. I was past forty when I came back, and I had done the math on what was left. What I had not noticed is that the chapter is not a promise about whether you still have time. It is a description of how time works for everybody, including the people who never left.
So the song is right that there is a season for everything. It is only wrong, and gently, about whether you get to see where you are standing in it.
If somebody sings this one in your car, you will have something to tell them at the next light.
Already quoted. Already answered.
Ecclesiastes is one of the seven Wisdom Books explored in The Original Search Engine. Learn more at solomongraybooks.com/the-book.
The overheard scenes in this series are figures, the way Job is a figure. See Post 0 for a note on the people in this series.
The verses are quoted from the New American Bible, Revised Edition (Ecclesiastes 3:1, 3:2, and 3:11).