Ecclesiastes 12:6

or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken The figurative character of the whole section, reaches its highest point here. It is clear however that the figures, whatever they may be, are symbolic of nothing less than death. We have had the notes of decay in organs and in functions brought before us one by one. Now we come to the actual dissolution of soul and body. It will help us to a right understanding to begin with the golden bowl. The noun is the same as that used in Zechariah 4:3-4, for the bowl of the golden seven-branched candlestick (better, lamp) of the Temple. It was the vessel, or reservoir, from which the oil flowed into the lamps. The lamp itself was, in the judgment of most students of the Mosaic ritual, the symbol of life perhaps, even in its very form, of the Tree of life in its highest manifestations. The symbolism of Greek thought harmonized with that of Hebrew, and "the lamp of life" was a familiar image. So when Pericles visited Anaxagoras, as he was dying of want and hunger, the sage said reproachfully "When we wish to keep the lamp burning, we take care to supply it with oil." (Plutarch, Pericles.) So Plato (de Legg. p. 776) and Lucretius (ii:78) describe the succession of many generations of mankind, with an allusive reference to the Lampadephoria, or torch races of Athens.

"Et quasi cursores vitai lampada tradunt."

"Like men who run a race, hand on the lamp of life."

So the "light of life" appears in Greek epitaphs,

Νὺξ μὲν ἐμὸν κατέχει ζωῆς φάος ὑπνοδοτείρη

"Sleep-giving night hath quenched my light of life."

Anthol. Graec. Ed. Jacobs, App.265.

It can scarcely remain doubtful then that the "golden bowl" is life as manifested through the material fabric of man's body. And if so, the "silver cord" in the imagery of the parable can only be the chain by which, as in houses or temples, the lamp hangs, i.e.when we interpret the parable, that on which the continuance of life depends. Death, elsewhere represented as the cutting of the thread of life by the "abhorred shears" of the Destinies, is here brought before us as the snapping of the chain, the extinction of the principle of life. The anatomist commentators have, as before, shewn their lack of poetic feeling by going in omnia aliaas to the interpretation of the symbols. The "golden bowl" has been identified with the skull or the stomach, and the "silver cord" with the tongue or the spinal marrow, and so on into a region of details into which it is not always pleasant to follow the interpreter.

or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern Better, or the pitcher be shattered. As with the Hebrews so also with the Greeks, life was represented by yet another symbol almost as universal as that of the burning lamp. The "fountain of life" was with God (Psalms 36:9). It was identified in its higher aspects with "the law of the wise" (Proverbs 13:14), with "the fear of the Lord" (Proverbs 14:27). The "fountain of the water of life" was the highest symbol of eternal blessedness (Revelation 21:6; Revelation 22:17). Two aspects of this symbolism are brought before us. (1) There is the spring or fountain that flows out of the rock, as in Isaiah 35:7; Isaiah 49:10. When men go to that spring with their pitcher (an "earthen vessel" as in Genesis 24:17) there is an obvious type of the action of the body (we may, perhaps, go so far with the Anatomists as to think specially of the action of the lungs) in drawing in the breath which sustains life. The "cistern" represents primarily the deep well or tank from which men draw water with a windlass and a rope and bucket (1 Samuel 19:22; Leviticus 11:36; Deuteronomy 6:11), a well like that of Sychar (John 4:6). Here obviously we have another parable of the mechanism of life, pointing to an action lying more remote than that of the fountain and the pitcher, and, if we have been right in connecting that with the act of breathing, we may as naturally see in this the action of the heart. Death is accordingly represented under both these figures. There will come a day when the pitcher shall be taken to the fountain for the last time and be broken as in the very act of drawing water, when the wheel that guides the current of the blood "which is the life" shall turn for the last time on its axis. Into the more detailed anatomical explanations which find in the pitcher and the wheel, the liver and the gall-duct, or the right and left ventricle, we refrain, as before, from entering.