nails and goads

The words of the wise are like goads, and like nails firmly fixed are the collected sayings; they are given by one Shepherd.

Ecclesiastes 12:11

This verse at the end of the book of Ecclesiastes is a key to understanding the book. It is a book that gives us observations about life that are both goads and nails. A goad is a pointed stick used by a herdsman to provoke livestock forward. It is not an elegant instrument. It has one job: make a reluctant beast uncomfortable enough to move along. It is the ancient tool used as a cattle prod.

The nails are a different kind of pointed instrument. They are used not to move with a sense of uncomfortability, but instead to fix something in place. Nails secure something down. They hold things together. Nails build stuff. They represent truths that hold together observations in a way that make sense of a larger, useful structure.

When reading Ecclesiastes then, it is good to realize that some of the statements are meant to be goads. They prod us by brute force and poke our sensibilities forward into movement with painful reality. Where we read terms like “under the sun”, “worthless”, or (most often and to great effect) “vanity”, we can see the goad is in the hand of The Preacher (the narrator of the book), pointing right at us. We feel the business end of the goad poking at us and making us quite uncomfortable in ways we don’t particularly like. And God wants us to have that response. It is one intention of Ecclesiastes.

But scattered among the goads are also some firmly driven nails throughout the book. These statements provide security and are frankly, a welcome relief from the constant poking of the goads. For instance, the last two verses of the book (Ecclesiastes 12:13-14) are perhaps the strongest nails in all the book, firmly building a structure through which we discern the framework of the book and bring it all together. God wisely gave us this unusual book of Hebrew wisdom to get our attention with goads and nails. It is brutally straightforward with its observations about life. It is brilliant in its wise advice for living beyond the uncomfortable ragged realizations. God gave us nails and goads because He knows we need them both.