Ecclesiastes — themes & analysis

The book’s central word is hevel. The King James renders it ‘vanity’ and the Latin Vulgate vanitas, and these translations have shaped the way the book has been read for most of its history. But hevel does not mean vanity in the modern English sense of self-importance, and it does not quite mean meaninglessness in the existentialist sense either. The literal meaning is breath, vapor, mist — the puff of breath visible on a cold morning, the steam from a cup, the faint exhalation that is gone before one has fixed on it.

The word names not a quality but a substance, or rather a kind of insubstantiality: that which is real but not stable, present but not graspable, here and immediately not. Qoheleth uses it to characterise the totality of human projects under the sun. ‘Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher; all is vanity.’ The Hebrew is hevel havelim, the superlative construction (like ‘song of songs’ or ‘holy of holies’): vapor of vapors, the vapor that is most thoroughly vapor.

The word does at least three things across the book. First, it names the brevity of human life: the days are like breath, gone before they are felt. Second, it names the elusiveness of meaning: the speaker has tried to grasp something solid in his various projects and finds that what he had thought was solid dissolves on contact. Third, it names a kind of absurdity: the gap between the effort one expends and what is finally returned for it, the way the moral order one expected is contradicted by the moral order one observes.

Modern translators have proposed several alternatives — ‘absurd’ (Michael Fox), ‘futile’ (NASB), ‘meaningless’ (NIV), ‘fleeting,’ ‘vapor’ — and each captures part of the word and loses part. The world Qoheleth describes is not a meaningless world in the cold metaphysical sense; it is a vapor world, a world made of what dissolves, observed by a man who is himself made of the same stuff and who knows it. The word is also, unmistakably, the proper name Abel — the brother killed by Cain in Genesis 4, whose life is the most literally fleeting in the Hebrew Bible. Whether Qoheleth is consciously punning on the name is unprovable; but the resonance is in the Hebrew.

Where to follow it: Ch. 1 (the opening thesis), Ch. 2 (the catalogue), Ch. 9 (death the leveller), Ch. 12 (the closing refrain).

Chapters 1 and 2 contain Qoheleth’s most extended autobiographical passage, in which he describes, project by project, his attempts to find lasting meaning, and the failure of each. He has applied his heart to seek and search out by wisdom concerning all things done under heaven. Result: hevel and vexation of spirit; for in much wisdom is much grief, and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.

He has tried pleasure: he has not withheld his heart from any joy; he has gathered singers and the delights of the sons of men, musical instruments of all sorts. Behold, all was hevel and vexation of spirit, and there was no profit under the sun. He has tried great works: he has built houses, planted vineyards, made gardens and orchards, made pools of water to water the wood that bringeth forth trees. He has tried wealth: he has gathered silver and gold and the peculiar treasure of kings. None of it has worked.

The catalogue is extraordinary because the speaker is not setting up a rhetorical contrast in which secular projects fail and a religious project succeeds. He has tried the religious project too — wisdom, the enterprise the rest of the canon recommends — and his complaint is precisely that it has not delivered the solid ground he was looking for. He has tried everything the wisdom tradition offers and found that none of it survives the test he is applying.

The reason none of it survives is the same in every case. The speaker is going to die. The wise man dies as the fool dies. The labour he has expended will be inherited by someone he does not know and who may be a fool. The legacy he hoped to leave will be forgotten in a generation or two or three. The catalogue does not end in despair, exactly. It ends in a kind of acceptance — that the labour was not nothing, that the days had their pleasure, that the work was good in its moment — but it refuses to grant any of these the permanence the speaker had been hoping to find.

Where to follow it: Ch. 1 (wisdom tried), Ch. 2 (pleasure, works, wealth), Ch. 4 (competitive labour), Ch. 9 (one fate for all).

Chapter 3 contains the most quoted passage in Ecclesiastes and one of the most quoted in any book of the Bible. ‘To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the 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; a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance.’ Fourteen pairs of opposites, twenty-eight times, the rhythmic ‘and a time to’ carrying the reader through the structure of a life as a sequence of arrivals and departures none of which the speaker has chosen.

The passage has been read in two opposite directions for two and a half thousand years. The optimistic reading takes the seasons as given by God, ordered, beautiful, the structure of providence — life has its rhythms, and the wise person learns to recognise the season he is in and to act accordingly. This is the reading Pete Seeger’s ‘Turn! Turn! Turn!’ made into a 1960s peace anthem, and it is not a wrong reading; the chapter does say that God has made everything beautiful in his time.

The pessimistic reading takes the seasons as imposed, beyond control, indifferent to the speaker’s preferences — there is a time to plant, but there is also a time to pluck up; there is a time to love, but there is also a time to hate; the speaker does not get to choose which time he is in, only to recognise it after the fact. This is also not a wrong reading; the chapter goes on to say that man cannot find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end, and that there is no good in them but for a man to rejoice and to do good in his life.

The strength of the chapter is that both readings are available at once, and the speaker is asking the reader to live with the doubleness rather than to resolve it. To every thing there is a season. The seasons come whether one wants them or not. The book knows this is cold comfort and offers it anyway, because it has tried all the warm alternatives and found them hevel.

Where to follow it: Ch. 3 (the seasons poem), Ch. 7 (wisdom in adversity), Ch. 11 (act before you can be sure), Ch. 12 (remember before the evil days come).

Across the book Qoheleth keeps returning to a single piece of practical advice that, given the bleakness of his observations, has surprised many readers. There is nothing better, he says, than that a man should rejoice in his own works; for that is his portion. Eat thy bread with joy, and drink thy wine with a merry heart. Live joyfully with the wife whom thou lovest all the days of the life of thy vanity, which he hath given thee under the sun, all the days of thy vanity: for that is thy portion in this life. Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest.

The advice has been given the Latin name carpe diem — seize the day — but Qoheleth’s version is darker than Horace’s. Horace’s seize-the-day comes from a man who has decided that life is short and ought to be enjoyed; Qoheleth’s comes from a man who has investigated every alternative project and found that the simple goods of food, drink, work, and the company of one’s wife are the only goods that have not failed his test.

They have not failed his test because he is not asking them to bear weight they cannot bear. He is not expecting eternal meaning from a meal. He is enjoying the meal. The advice is offered throughout the book in a tone of considered acceptance rather than dismissal. The good things are not nothing. They are the portion God has given. The labour, the wife, the bread, the wine: these are real, and they are gifts, and the wise person receives them as gifts in their season and does not ask them to be more than they are.

The reader who comes to the carpe diem passages without the rest of the book will read them as a generic advice to enjoyment. The reader who comes to them as the conclusion of the catalogue of failed projects will read them as something harder won and more durable: the discovery that, after all the larger projects have failed to provide what was wanted of them, the smaller ones turn out to be sufficient.

Where to follow it: Ch. 2 (first carpe diem passage), Ch. 5 (eat and drink as gift of God), Ch. 9 (eat, drink, enjoy — there is no work in the grave), Ch. 11 (rejoice while you are young).

The book closes with a passage that has been the most argued-over in the wisdom literature. After the great allegory of old age and the haunting refrain ‘vanity of vanities, all is vanity,’ a third-person voice intervenes. ‘And moreover, because the preacher was wise, he still taught the people knowledge; yea, he gave good heed, and sought out, and set in order many proverbs. The preacher sought to find out acceptable words: and that which was written was upright, even words of truth.’ Then: ‘Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man. For God shall bring every work into judgment, with every secret thing, whether it be good, or whether it be evil.’

These last verses have been read in three main ways. The first is that they are Qoheleth’s own voice, summing up his book — having shown the failure of every project, he closes with what survives: reverence for God and observance of the commandments, since these are not the same kind of project and are not subject to the same hevel. The second is that they are an editor’s correction, added after Qoheleth’s death to soften the radical edge of the text and make it acceptable for inclusion in the canon.

The third reading, increasingly favoured by modern critics, is more subtle: the frame voice is real and is doing real editorial work, but is not negating Qoheleth so much as positioning him. Qoheleth’s investigation is true. The conclusion the frame draws — fear God and keep his commandments — is also true. The book exists to hold both at once.

What no reading has been able to do is make the closing tidy. The book ends on a doctrine the body of the book has just spent twelve chapters refusing to find sufficient, and the canon has kept the tension. Whichever reading one takes, the closing is what makes Ecclesiastes Ecclesiastes: a book that refuses, even at the very end, to resolve the questions it has raised.

Where to follow it: Ch. 1 (the opening thesis the frame encloses), Ch. 11 (act before the evil days), Ch. 12 (allegory, refrain, closing frame).