The theme of the motley essays collected in this book is the shimmer of good and evil, their deceptive similarities, and their intermittent course in the river of time. The title refers the reader to the verse of Ecclesiastes (12:3): "In the day when the keepers of the house tremble and the men of power bend..." Ecclesiastes spoke about old age, when a person goes blind, goes deaf, loses his teeth, bends under the weight of diseases and years. But we have the right to attribute this to disturbing times when half-forgotten concepts of good and evil suddenly take over consciousness and become meaningful. Arkady Bentsionovich Kovelman is a professor, Doctor of Historical Sciences, author of a number of monographs and collections of articles, including: "Rhetoric in the Shadow of the Pyramids: The Mass Consciousness of Roman Egypt" (Moscow : Nauka, 1988); "Between Alexandria and Jerusalem: the Dynamics of Hellenistic and Jewish Culture" (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2005); "Hellenism and Jewish Culture" (Moscow — Jerusalem: Bridges of Culture — Gesharim, 2007); "Talmud, Plato and the Radiance of Glory" (Moscow : Scribniki, 2011); "Hidden and revealed in the Talmud. An essay on non-philosophical thinking at the end of Antiquity" (in collaboration with W. Gershovich) (Moscow : Indrik, 2016); "Included in the Pardes. Paradoxes of Jewish, Christian and Secular Culture" (Moscow : Scribes, 2019); "The Children of Ecclesiastes (Shestov, Brodsky and others)" (Moscow : Nauka, 2024).