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A Time For Everything Rhetorical Devices

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Rhetorical Analysis of Solomon’s “A Time for Everything” (Ecclesiastes 3)
Ecclesiastes by King Solomon highlights that there is an absolute truth and therefore a right time for everything. It validates the human experience- sadness, joy, grief, and anger- while serving as a reminder that the universe works circularly through divinity (LD, 2021). Ecclesiastes serves as both a form of comfort and reprimanding for believers to trust in God’s plan and rejoice in the meaninglessness of life. As one of the most famous excerpts, the aim of this essay is to identify and discuss features of rhetoric Solomon uses in Ecclesiastes 3: “A Time for Everything” that makes it so persuasive and compelling to its audience.
The excerpt begins with the first verse …show more content…

By the end of the passage, the trusting reader has been primed and is anticipating a verdict to the question, “What now?” Thus, the author is able to break the previous and rather rigid structure of parallelism and shift to a more candid tone. The author engages in subtle positive self-presentation when he speaks in the first person. He begins “I have seen the burden God has laid...”10. Solomon carefully earns the audience’s trust through his position of observation rather than moral superiority when he claims he can only “say to [him]self” in verse 17 what he “saw” in verse 16. Contrastingly, in a vehement negative other-presentation in verse 18, he insists that when tested by God, humans show their true colors and are “like the animals” with the “same fate that awaits them”19. He emphasizes that he too is a sinner, and it is only his insight that makes him credible. The audience can relate because just like Solomon, they find discomfort in the question “Who rises upward?21” Through ‘degrading’ himself, Solomon normalizes the human experience, and he effectively reinforces his position because he has a shining factor

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