Vanity of Vanities: The Preacher's Survey of Everything

The opening word of Ecclesiastes is hevel — vapor, breath, mist. It is the word that becomes the King James translation's "vanity": Vanity of vanities, all is vanity. But "vanity" in modern English suggests pride and self-admiration, not what Qoheleth means. What he means is something closer to: it all disappears like breath. It is all mist. All of it — every generation, every achievement, every river that runs to the sea only to return and run again.

Qoheleth identifies himself as the son of David, king in Jerusalem — the tradition reads this as Solomon, the wisest and wealthiest king, surveying from the height of everything. He has tried wisdom, he says. He has tried folly. He has tried great works — vineyards and orchards and pools of water, servants and herds, silver and gold and singers, pleasures of every kind. None of it satisfied. Whoever loves money is not satisfied with money. He accumulated more than anyone before him in Jerusalem, and then he turned and looked at all his works, and behold, it was vanity and a striving after wind.

This is not depression dressed up as philosophy. Qoheleth's voice is controlled, ironic, precise. He observes that generations pass and the earth remains. The sun rises and sets. The wind goes south and circles north. Rivers run to the sea, and the sea is never full. There is no new thing under the sun. What is crooked cannot be made straight; what is lacking cannot be counted.

The radical move of the book is that it gets the theology of Proverbs — wisdom is rewarded, righteousness prospers — and systematically dismantles it from the inside. The righteous die young. The wicked live long. Chance, not merit, determines what happens. The same death comes for the wise man and the fool.

And yet the book does not end in despair. It ends in eating and drinking, in finding enjoyment in work, in the company of one you love, in the simple present that is all anyone actually has. The vapor will come for everything — this too shall pass — and that is not only a loss. It is also a permission.