Where does “to everything there is a season” come from?

The poem

For everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;

Ecclesiastes 3:1–8 is the best-known passage in the book. After the opening line come fourteen pairs of opposites, twenty-eight times in all. The first verse uses two Hebrew words: zeman, an appointed season, and ‘et, a time or moment, the word that then rings through every line. Read in groups, the pairs cover a whole life.

• Life and land: born and die, plant and pluck up, kill and heal, break down and build up (3:2–3).
• Feeling: weep and laugh, mourn and dance (3:4).
• Holding and letting go: cast away stones and gather them, embrace and refrain, seek and lose, keep and throw away (3:5–6).
• Words and loyalties: tear and sew, keep silence and speak, love and hate, war and peace (3:7–8).

The poem begins with birth and death and ends with war and peace, the outer edges of one life and of a nation’s. One pair has puzzled readers for centuries: “a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together” (3:5). Clearing a field for the plow? Gathering stones to build a wall? The text does not say.

What the Preacher means

The poem is not a list of permissions, as if hating were fine on schedule. It is an observation: people do not choose their times. The next verses draw the lesson.

He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in their hearts, yet so that man can’t find out the work that God has done from the beginning even to the end.

Humans sense the whole, eternity in their hearts, but cannot see it. So the Preacher’s advice is modest: rejoice, do good, eat and drink and enjoy your work, because that “is the gift of God” (3:12–13). The famous line sits in a book that calls everything breath, as what “vanity of vanities” means explains, and it reads differently there: less a motivational poster than a sigh, followed by an invitation to supper.

Pete Seeger’s song

The wording in the question is the song’s. The King James Version (1611) reads, “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.” In 1959 the folk singer Pete Seeger set those verses to music, keeping the King James words almost entirely and rearranging a few lines. He added the refrain, “Turn! Turn! Turn!”, and a closing line of his own after “a time for peace”: “I swear it’s not too late.”

The Byrds

In 1965 the Byrds recorded it, built around Roger McGuinn’s chiming twelve-string guitar, and in December their “Turn! Turn! Turn!” reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. As American troops poured into Vietnam, a song that ended in a plea for peace landed hard, and a few verses from an ancient Hebrew book became one of the anthems of the decade. Ecclesiastes 3 is still often read at funerals.