an involuntary happening: something that simply befalls a person, outside their planning or control
At its core the word names something that just befalls a person: an event that was not planned or chosen, an accident, a coincidence, a piece of luck good or bad. It is the ordinary Hebrew way of saying that something happened of itself.
The same plain word is used in two very different tones. In the stories it means everyday chance. In Ruth it is almost a play on words: Ruth's chance chanced to bring her to the field of the very man who would rescue her family, and the reader is left to sense a hidden hand behind the coincidence. In 1 Samuel the Philistines use it to float the possibility that their troubles were only chance rather than the work of Israel's God, and Saul uses it to guess that David is absent because of some accidental mishap.
In Ecclesiastes the writer takes this common word and makes it carry the weight of his whole argument. Seven of its ten appearances are here, and he uses it to flatten the distinctions people build their lives on: the same thing happens
- to the wise and the foolish
- to people and to animals
- to the good and the wicked
That one thing is death. Scholars disagree over how dark he means it: whether he points to blind chance, to the plain fact that death comes to all, or to a fate fixed in advance. The word itself stays stable; what shifts is how much weight he asks it to bear.
Nuances
Whether the narrator's chance language at Ruth 2:3 is ironic, pointing past coincidence to hidden providence, or straightforwardly means chance.
- majorityIronic providence: the coincidence language is used deliberately so the reader sees God's hand guiding Ruth to the field of a kinsman-redeemer.; Robert L. Hubbard Jr., The Book of Ruth, NICOT (Eerdmans, 1988), 138-39.; Edward F. Campbell Jr., Ruth, Anchor Bible 7 (Doubleday, 1975), 91-95.
- minorityStraightforward chance: in prose the word simply means coincidence, and the providence reading imports Naomi's later language back into this verse.; Jeremy Schipper, Ruth, Anchor Yale Bible 7D (Yale University Press, 2016), 117.
Disputed
In Ecclesiastes, what force the writer gives the word: impersonal chance, the shared fate of death, or a divinely fixed fate. The lexical sense (an involuntary happening) is agreed; the disagreement is over its weight in the argument.
- majorityIt names the shared fate of death, the one event that overtakes wise and fool, human and beast, righteous and wicked alike.; C. L. Seow, Ecclesiastes, Anchor Bible 18C (Doubleday, 1997), 135-36, 305-7.; Tremper Longman III, The Book of Ecclesiastes, NICOT (Eerdmans, 1998), 100-103.; Roland E. Murphy, Ecclesiastes, WBC 23A (Word, 1992), 89.
- minorityIt names impersonal chance and the unpredictability of a world where act and consequence are not reliably connected.; Michael V. Fox, Qohelet and His Contradictions, JSOTSup 71 (Almond, 1989), 33.; Michael V. Fox, Ecclesiastes, JPS Bible Commentary (JPS, 2004).
- minorityIt names a divinely determined fate, functionally close to Stoic determinism.; Dominic Rudman, Determinism in the Book of Ecclesiastes, JSOTSup 316 (Sheffield Academic, 2001), 34-37.; Rainer Braun, Kohelet und die fruhhellenistische Popularphilosophie, BZAW 130 (de Gruyter, 1973), 170.