“Let your garments always be white”
Let your garments always be white, and never spare the oil for your head. (Ecclesiastes 9:8 BSB)
What it sounds like today
A random instruction about wearing white and using hair oil.
The cultural key
This is not fashion or grooming advice; it is an image of festivity. In the ancient world, bright white garments and a head glistening with perfumed oil were how you dressed for a banquet, a wedding, a celebration, while mourners wore dark sackcloth, tore their clothes, and put ashes and dust, not oil, on their heads. To keep your clothes always white and your head always oiled is to live perpetually in the posture of a feast rather than a funeral. Coming straight after the Teacher's meditation on death, the counsel is striking: since life is a fleeting breath, receive each ordinary day, your food, your work, your companions, as a gift to be enjoyed, dressed for the party. Read literally it is a puzzling dress code; read as custom it is a call to joy in the face of death.
Recovered meaning
White clothes and oil on the head were the dress of a feast, the opposite of a mourner's sackcloth and ashes. The Teacher urges his reader to live perpetually dressed for celebration, savoring each fleeting day.