Ecclesiastes

The word translated futility in the BSB, and vanity in the King James Version, is hevel. It occurs thirty-eight times in this short book, and it brackets the whole of it: the same phrase opens at 1:2 and closes at 12:8, so everything in between sits inside it. Hevel havalim is a Hebrew superlative built the way holy of holies is built, which is to say it means hevel to the highest possible degree. Get the word wrong and you will get the book wrong, and most English readers have been handed it wrong.

Literally hevel is vapour. Breath on a cold morning, steam off a cup, mist burning off a field. Psalm 39:5 uses it of a human lifetime, in the BSB's words "each man at his best exists as but a breath." Abel, the first man to die, is named Hevel in Hebrew, and whether or not the author of Ecclesiastes had that in mind, the association is there in the language: a life that was over almost before it registered.

Now the translations. Jerome's Latin gave vanitas vanitatum and the King James gave vanity of vanities. The trouble is that in modern English vanity means conceit, a completely different idea, so the verse now sounds like a complaint about pride. The NIV went the other way with meaningless, which is worse, because it converts an image into a philosophical verdict the book never delivers. The BSB, which the anchor verse above quotes, chose a third word, futility. That avoids the conceit, and it is gentler than meaningless, but a futile act is one that fails of its purpose, so it still leans toward a verdict. To its credit the BSB's footnote at 1:2 says the literal sense is vapor or breath and lists vanity and meaningless as other possibilities. Qoheleth never says life has no meaning. He says he cannot get hold of it.

Vapour keeps what the metaphor actually carries, and it carries at least three things at once. Insubstantial: you cannot grasp it, there is nothing there to hold. Fleeting: it is gone while you are looking at it. Elusive: it will not stay still long enough to be measured. Douglas Miller argued in a 2002 study that the word works precisely as a symbol holding several of these senses together, and that flattening it to any one of them loses the book's method. Michael Fox pressed a fourth option and translated it as absurd, meaning the gap between what a person does and what results from it, a world where the connection between act and outcome has come loose.

So read the opening line as: vapour of vapours, everything is vapour. Then notice that this is an observation about the graspability of life, not a verdict on its worth, and that it is delivered by a man who will shortly tell you to enjoy your dinner. Translate hevel as meaningless and that second half of the book becomes incoherent. Translate it as vapour and it makes perfect sense.

The name is a job description. Qoheleth is formed from the root that gives the word for an assembly, so it means something like the assembler, the one who gathers or addresses a gathering. The Greek translators rendered it Ekklesiastes, a member or speaker of the assembly, which is where our title comes from, and Luther turned it into Der Prediger, the Preacher, and English versions from the sixteenth century onward also used the Preacher. The BSB prints Teacher throughout, with a footnote offering the Convener, the Preacher or the leader of the assembly, and Teacher is probably closer than Preacher for a modern ear.

1:1 calls him the son of David, king in Jerusalem, and chapters 1 and 2 conduct what is often called the royal experiment: a man with unlimited means tries pleasure, building, gardens, wealth, music, wine and wisdom itself, systematically, to see whether any of it yields a lasting gain. Nobody but Solomon fits that description. And then the Solomon persona quietly disappears. From chapter 3 onwards the speaker sounds like a subject rather than a king: he advises obedience and caution in the presence of a king in 8:2 to 3, he describes a system of officials answering to higher officials over the poor in 5:8, and in 10:20 he warns you not to curse the king even in your thoughts, or the rich even in your bedroom, because a bird of the air may carry your words. Kings do not usually give that advice.

The language points the same way. The Hebrew of Ecclesiastes is late, closer to the Hebrew of the post-exilic books and of the Mishnah than to the Hebrew of Samuel, and it contains at least two Persian loanwords: pardes, a park or orchard, at 2:5, and pitgam, a decree, at 8:11. Persian words imply the Persian empire, which puts the book somewhere after the exile, and most scholars settle on the fourth or third century before Christ. Franz Delitzsch, a conservative nineteenth-century commentator who had no wish to reach that conclusion, put the case in one sentence: if the book of Koheleth were of old Solomonic origin, then there is no history of the Hebrew language.

The traditional case deserves a fair hearing rather than a dismissal. It rests on the superscription, which is part of the canonical text; on the internal claims of unmatched wisdom and wealth, which are hard to read as anything but Solomonic; and on the long tradition, Jewish and Christian, of taking them at face value. Defenders have also argued that the linguistic evidence is less decisive than it looks, since some of the unusual forms may reflect a northern dialect or Phoenician influence rather than a late date, a case Mitchell Dahood pressed in the mid twentieth century.

There is also a reading that does not require either side to lose. The book may be deliberately written in the voice of Solomon, as a considered literary device rather than a deception: who better to report that having everything yields no lasting gain than the man who is remembered for having everything? Ancient writers composed in the voice of a famous figure without anyone imagining fraud. On that reading the persona is an argument, and the book is doing to Solomon's reputation exactly what 1 Kings 11 does to it.

Most preaching on Ecclesiastes softens it, usually by treating chapters 1 to 11 as the wrong answer and 12:13 as the right one. Do not do that. The book is more useful, and more true, if you let it make its case at full power, and the case is formidable. Death is the first move and it does most of the work. The wise man and the fool meet the same end, and both are forgotten, so the advantage of wisdom is real but temporary and nobody will remember which of them you were. Everything you built passes to an heir who did not build it and may be a fool. In 3:19 to 21 man and beast have the same breath and go to the same place, and Qoheleth will not claim to know otherwise; his question in 3:21 is "Who knows?"

The second move is injustice, observed rather than theorised. In 4:1 he looks at the oppressed and notices that they have no comforter, and says it twice. In 8:14 there are righteous people who get what the wicked deserve and wicked people who get what the righteous deserve. In 7:15 the righteous perish and the wicked live long. In 9:11 "The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong," and "time and chance happen to all." The word usually translated chance is pega', which means an occurrence, something that simply meets you. He is not denying providence. He is denying that you can read it off outcomes, which is the exact conclusion Job's friends refused.

The third move is the limit of knowing, and this is the one modern readers underestimate. 3:11 says, in the BSB, "He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men, yet they cannot fathom the work that God has done from beginning to end." The word the BSB renders eternity is olam, which is variously rendered eternity, the world, a sense of past and future, or, by way of a proposed emendation, ignorance; the BSB has chosen one without a footnote, and the crux is unresolved. Either way the sentence describes a creature built to want the whole picture and constitutionally unable to see it. 8:17 is blunter: he saw every work of God and that, despite his efforts to search it out, a man is unable to comprehend the work that is done under the sun. 6:12 asks who knows what is good for a man in his few fleeting days, and who can tell him what will come after him.

And then, seven times, the turn that a nihilist could not write. Eat your bread, drink your wine, enjoy your work, be with the wife you love, because this is your portion and it is a gift from the hand of God. The passages are at 2:24, 3:12, 3:22, 5:18, 8:15, 9:7 and 11:7 to 10, and the last of them runs straight into the line about remembering your Creator in the days of your youth at 12:1. Notice the logic. He does not recommend enjoyment because he has found the answer. He recommends it because he has not, and because bread and work and company are actually in front of you while the answer is not. The word he uses is gift.

The fear of God is in the book too, well before the epilogue: at 3:14, at 5:7, at 7:18, at 8:12. So is judgement, at 3:17 and at 11:9, where he tells the young man to rejoice and then reminds him that God will bring him to judgment for all these things. Whatever you decide about the last six verses, you cannot say that fear of God and judgement were foreign to the book until somebody added them at the end.

At 12:9 the voice changes. Up to that point Qoheleth has spoken in the first person; now somebody speaks about him in the third: "Not only was the Teacher wise, but he also taught the people knowledge; he pondered, searched out, and arranged many proverbs." Then a warning that the words of the wise are like goads, that "There is no end to the making of many books, and much study wearies the body," which every seminary student should have framed. And then the closing: "Fear God and keep His commandments, because this is the whole duty of man. For God will bring every deed into judgment." One more point of typography: at 12:11 the BSB prints "driven by a single Shepherd" with a capital S, reading the shepherd as God and so vouching for the whole collection of wise words; the BSB's own footnote offers lowercase "shepherd" as an alternative. Hebrew has no capitals, and the phrase could equally mean a human teacher or the book's own author, which would leave the relation between the frame and the book more open. The capital leans toward the completion reading described below, so weigh it as the translators' choice and not as evidence.

One reading takes this as a corrective. On this view a later and more orthodox hand has framed a dangerous book, put a safe summary at the end, and made it possible to keep the rest. Michael Fox developed a sophisticated version in 1977, arguing that the whole book is presented as quoted speech inside a frame supplied by a narrator, so that the reader is never hearing Qoheleth unmediated at all. Some go further and see two hands in the epilogue itself: 12:9 to 11 admiring Qoheleth as a teacher, and 12:12 to 14 rather more nervous, warning about books and reaching for commandments and judgement.

The other reading takes the epilogue as completion, not correction, and has real evidence. Fear God is already in the book four times over. Judgement is already in the book at 3:17 and 11:9. Keeping commandments is the logical destination of a book whose whole argument is that you cannot control outcomes, since if you cannot secure the future by cleverness then obedience and reverence are what remain to you. On this reading the epilogue is a summary written by someone who understood the book well, and it does not cancel a line of it.

There is a third possibility worth naming: that both are true. Even if the epilogue came from a second hand, the canon includes it, and the book we have is the book with the epilogue on it. What the epilogue does not do, on any reading, is retract. It does not say that Qoheleth was wrong about death, or about the oppressed having no comforter, or about the righteous who perish. It says that given all of that, you should fear God. That is a conclusion drawn from the argument, not a replacement for it.

How you teach this shapes what students hear, which is a reason to state the options rather than to settle them quietly. Read as correction, the epilogue makes eleven chapters a foil, and a student will want to know why scripture would argue at such length with itself. Read as completion, it gives them permission to say the true and terrible things out loud and still end up fearing God. Both readings have serious defenders, and a class that has been shown both will read the book more carefully than one that has been handed a verdict.

It nearly was not, and the tradition preserved the argument. The Mishnah records it twice, in the tractate Yadayim and again in Eduyot, where the school of Shammai holds that Ecclesiastes does not defile the hands and the school of Hillel holds that it does. Defiling the hands is the technical rabbinic idiom for counting as holy scripture, so that dispute is a dispute about the canon. The Talmud, at Shabbat 30b, says plainly that the sages sought to suppress the book because its words contradict one another, and reports that it was kept because its beginning and its end are words of Torah. That is an honest ancient admission that the book is difficult, and it is a better starting point than pretending it is not.

The first reason it belongs is that it is true, and the canon is not a collection of encouraging material. People do die and are forgotten. The oppressed frequently have no comforter. Wealth does pass to heirs who waste it. A scripture that could not say those sentences would be a scripture that had to be put down whenever life got serious, and the people who most need a Bible are the people for whom life has already got serious.

The second reason is canonical. Proverbs read flatly becomes a system for managing God, and Ecclesiastes makes that impossible. Job attacks the same problem from the side of the sufferer; Ecclesiastes attacks it from the side of the successful man who did everything right and still cannot find the profit in it. His keyword yitron, gain or surplus, is used nowhere else in the Hebrew Bible, and his relentless question, what is the gain, is aimed straight at the assumption that piety yields a return. That is not scepticism corroding faith. It is the fear of God defended against the idea that God can be mastered.

The third reason is what the book does with ordinary life. Precisely because nothing can be secured, bread, wine, work and love stop being instruments for building a legacy and become gifts to be received today. That is a deeply Christian instinct arrived at without a word about resurrection. And the New Testament knows this book: when Paul says in Romans 8:20 that the creation was subjected to futility, the Greek word he uses is the very word the Greek translation of Ecclesiastes uses for hevel. Paul adds a hope Qoheleth does not have, and he does not contradict his diagnosis.

One last detail that tells you how Jewish tradition understood the book. Ecclesiastes is read in the synagogue at Sukkot, the autumn feast of booths, which is the most joyful festival of the year. A congregation living in temporary shelters, celebrating a harvest, hears a book about how fleeting everything is. That is not a contradiction. That is someone who understood both the book and the feast.