A Time for Everything: The Most Famous Poem About Time

'There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens: a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot.' Ecclesiastes 3 lists twenty-eight pairs — birth and death, planting and uprooting, killing and healing, weeping and laughing, mourning and dancing, war and peace. The Teacher's point is not comfort but determinism. If everything has its appointed time, then human action changes nothing. 'What do workers gain from their toil?' God has set eternity in the human heart — but no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end. The Byrds turned fourteen verses into the most played pop song about the Bible.