Ecclesiastes: Breath

At a Glance

Who wrote it: A writer who calls himself Qohelet, the Teacher, and speaks as if he were Solomon. The real author is unknown, and lived long after Solomon.

When: Its Hebrew is late and uses Persian words. Most scholars date it to the 300s or 200s BC.

Where it fits: Set, by the writer’s pose, in the Jerusalem of King Solomon (1 Kings 1–11). Written much later, after Jerusalem fell in 586 BC, when Judah lived under Persian or Greek rulers.

Where I quote it: Never. But my parable of the rich fool makes Ecclesiastes’ argument (Luke 12:16–21).

If you only read three chapters: Ecclesiastes 1, Ecclesiastes 3 and Ecclesiastes 9.

Words to Know

Qohelet — the writer’s title. It means something like the one who gathers an assembly. The Greek Ecclesiastes means the same. I call him the Teacher. Your Bible may call him the Preacher.

Hevel — the book’s key word. It means breath, vapor or mist. Your Bible may say vanity or meaningless.

Under the sun — the writer’s phrase for life as we can see it, here, on earth.

Labor — hard work, and what it gets you.

The Book in Brief

Ecclesiastes is the meditation of a man who calls himself the Teacher, a son of David and king in Jerusalem. It does not move in a straight line. It circles the same questions again and again. What do people get from all their work? What is left when they die?

In chapter 1 he announces that everything is breath. Generations come and go, the sun rises and sets, the rivers run to the sea, and nothing is new under the sun. In chapter 2 he tests pleasure, wine, great building projects, gardens, servants, silver and gold, and finds nothing that lasts. Wisdom is better than folly, yet the wise man and the fool both die, and whoever comes after him will inherit what he built. Chapter 3 is the famous poem of times, a time to be born and a time to die, followed by a plain admission that no one can see the whole of what God is doing.

Chapters 4 to 6 look at the world around him: the tears of the oppressed, rivalry, loneliness, officials stacked on officials, and the way money never satisfies. Chapters 7 to 9 are sayings and observations. It is better to go to a funeral than to a party. The good sometimes suffer and the wicked sometimes prosper, and the same fate comes to everyone. He urges his reader to eat bread with joy, to enjoy the wife he loves and to work hard while there is time, because chance strikes the strong and the weak alike. Chapters 10 and 11 are mostly short proverbs about fools, rulers and taking risks, with a call to rejoice while young and to remember that God will judge.

Chapter 12 begins with advice to remember your Creator in your youth, then gives a poem about the body failing in old age. The book ends with someone speaking about the Teacher in the third person. He says that the Teacher taught the people knowledge and weighed many proverbs, and he sums up: people should fear God and keep his commandments.

The book opens with one word, repeated: “Vanity of vanities,” says the Preacher; “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.” (Ecclesiastes 1:2).

The Hebrew word is hevel. It does not mean pride. It means breath, vapor, the mist you see on a cold morning that is gone before you can touch it. Breath of breaths. Everything is breath.

Abel, the first person killed in the scriptures, has the same name in Hebrew: Hevel. A breath. Here and gone.

Go deeperBreath, vapor or vanity? How one word was translated

No English word fits hevel perfectly. In Hebrew it is an everyday word for breath, the puff of air you can see on a cold morning. Elsewhere in the scriptures it stands for things that do not last. Man is like a breath (Psalm 144:4). The prophets use it for idols that cannot save: They are vanity, a work of delusion (Jeremiah 10:15). The Teacher uses it more than thirty times.

The word had a long journey into English. The Greek translators in Egypt rendered it mataiotes, which means emptiness or futility. Jerome’s Latin Bible, around AD 400, rendered it vanitas. English Bibles followed, and “Vanity of vanities” became famous through the King James Version of 1611. Today vanity mostly means pride, which is why many readers hear the line wrongly.¹

Modern translators have tried meaningless, futile, pointless, absurd and breath, and the choice changes the Teacher. If everything is meaningless, he is a man in despair. If everything is breath, he is a man who sees how short life is and says, so enjoy it. The scholar Michael Fox argued in 1999 that the best English word is absurd, because the Teacher’s complaint is that the world does not make sense: rewards do not match deeds. Others keep breath or vapor, because that is what the Hebrew word says.¹

The experiment

The Teacher speaks as a king in Jerusalem, a son of David, and he runs an experiment on his own life.

He tries pleasure. He tries wine. He builds houses, plants vineyards, makes gardens and parks with pools. He buys slaves, collects silver and gold, gathers singers. Whatever my eyes desired, I didn’t keep from them (Ecclesiastes 2:10).

And then: I looked at all the works that my hands had worked, and at the labor that I had labored to do; and behold, all was vanity and a chasing after wind (Ecclesiastes 2:11).

The word paradise comes from a Persian word for an enclosed garden. That word is in this book, in the list of the Teacher’s parks (Ecclesiastes 2:5). It is one of the signs that the book was written centuries after Solomon, in a world shaped by Persia.²

Go deeperHow scholars know Ecclesiastes is late

The Teacher speaks as Solomon, but most scholars think the book was written centuries after him. They reach that mostly by the language.

The word paradise is one clue. Another is pitgam, a Persian word for a decree or sentence (Ecclesiastes 8:11), which turns up in other late writings. The word for “season” in the famous poem, zeman (Ecclesiastes 3:1), was borrowed from Aramaic and otherwise appears in late books such as Nehemiah and Esther. And much of the grammar looks more like the Hebrew of the Mishnah, written down around AD 200, than the Hebrew of Kings.²³

The other end of the range comes from the Dead Sea Scrolls. Fragments of Ecclesiastes were found at Qumran, copied around 175 to 150 BC judging by the shape of the letters. The book had to exist before that scroll was made.³

So the book belongs somewhere between the Persian conquest of Babylon in 539 BC and the middle of the 100s BC. Within that range, scholars divide. C. L. Seow places it in the Persian period, before Alexander the Great took the region in 332 BC, and argues from the language and the economic world it describes. Martin Hengel heard Greek ideas in it and placed it under the Ptolemies, the Greek kings of Egypt who ruled Judea in the 200s BC.³ The date in the At a Glance box, the 300s or 200s BC, takes the middle ground.

Who will get it?

What troubles the Teacher most is death. The wise man must die just like the fool! (Ecclesiastes 2:16).

And then the money. I hated all my labor in which I labored under the sun, because I must leave it to the man who comes after me. Who knows whether he will be a wise man or a fool? (Ecclesiastes 2:18–19).

I told a story about this. A rich man had such a good harvest that he had nowhere to put it. So he decided to tear down his barns and build bigger ones, and then say to himself, Soul, you have many goods laid up for many years. Take your ease, eat, drink, and be merry.

But God said to him, ‘You foolish one, tonight your soul is required of you. The things which you have prepared—whose will they be?’ (Luke 12:19–20).

That is the Teacher’s question, in a story. Whose will they be?

A time for everything

You probably know Ecclesiastes 3, even if you have never opened the book.

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 3:1–2).

An American folk singer set those verses to music in the 1950s, and a rock band made it a hit in 1965.⁴ It became one of the few pieces of the scriptures that people who never go to church can sing.

Read on past the famous part, though. A few verses later the Teacher says that humans and animals share the same fate. All go to one place. All are from the dust, and all turn to dust again. Who knows the spirit of man, whether it goes upward, and the spirit of the animal, whether it goes downward to the earth? (Ecclesiastes 3:20–21).

He did not know. He said so. That is in my scriptures too.

The tears of the oppressed

The Teacher is not only gloomy about himself. He looks at the world and sees injustice.

Then I returned and saw all the oppressions that are done under the sun: and behold, the tears of those who were oppressed, and they had no comforter; and on the side of their oppressors there was power; but they had no comforter (Ecclesiastes 4:1).

And he understood how it works. If you see the oppression of the poor, and the violent taking away of justice and righteousness in a district, don’t marvel at the matter, for one official is eyed by a higher one, and there are officials over them (Ecclesiastes 5:8).

An official over an official over an official, each one taking his share, all the way up. Nobody in particular is responsible. That is how the poor are ground down in every empire, and the Teacher saw it in his.

Money

He who loves silver shall not be satisfied with silver (Ecclesiastes 5:10).

The sleep of a laboring man is sweet, whether he eats little or much; but the abundance of the rich will not allow him to sleep (Ecclesiastes 5:12).

He watched a man pile up riches and lose them in a bad venture, so that his son was born with nothing in his hand (Ecclesiastes 5:13–14).

I said, Don’t lay up treasures for yourselves on the earth, where moth and rust consume, and where thieves break through and steal (Matthew 6:19). The Teacher would have nodded.

Eat your bread

And yet this is not a hopeless book. Over and over, the Teacher comes back to the same advice.

Go your way—eat your bread with joy, and drink your wine with a merry heart … Live joyfully with the wife whom you love all the days of your life of vanity … Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might (Ecclesiastes 9:7–10).

Life is breath. So do not waste it on chasing more. Eat with the people you love. Do your work well. Enjoy the day you have.

I was called a glutton and a drunkard. At a wedding in Cana, when the wine ran out, I made more (John 2:1–11). And I told my friends, Don’t be anxious for tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Each day’s own evil is sufficient (Matthew 6:34).

The Teacher would have come to that wedding.

Time and chance

The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happen to them all (Ecclesiastes 9:11).

That is a hard verse for anyone who believes the world is perfectly fair. Like Job, the Teacher refuses to pretend.

The ending someone added

The book ends with a beautiful, sad poem about growing old, and the body failing, before the silver cord is severed, or the golden bowl is broken … and the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the spirit returns to God who gave it (Ecclesiastes 12:6–7).

Then, in the last few verses, the voice changes. The narrator who briefly framed the book at the start now speaks about the Teacher in the third person at length, and sums up: Fear God and keep his commandments; for this is the whole duty of man (Ecclesiastes 12:13).

Most scholars think an editor added those lines, perhaps to make the book safe for the scriptures.⁵ Even so, my people kept arguing. Teachers after me still debated whether Ecclesiastes was holy.⁶

It stayed. A book that says I do not know, and everything is breath, and eat your bread with joy, is in the scriptures I grew up on. That should give you permission to say the same things.

Go deeperThe day teachers argued over Ecclesiastes

Teachers after my time had a strange test for whether a scroll was holy. They said a holy scroll made the hands unclean. Anyone who touched one had to wash. The Talmud explains that this rule was made so that people would stop storing the priests’ sacred food beside the scrolls. It became a way of saying, this book is scripture.⁷

The Mishnah records the argument over Ecclesiastes. The school of Shammai said it did not make the hands unclean. The school of Hillel said it did. Another passage reports that on the day the teachers seated Rabbi Eleazar ben Azariah in the academy, which tradition places at Yavneh near the end of the first century AD, they settled the question for Ecclesiastes and the Song of Songs: both do.⁶

Why did some want to hide it away? The Talmud says its words contradict one another. Why did they keep it? Because it begins with words of Torah and ends with words of Torah. Notice what saved it: the beginning and the ending.⁷

This is also the origin of a story you may have heard, that a “Council of Jamnia,” the Greek name for Yavneh, drew up the list of books in the Hebrew Bible. In 1871 the historian Heinrich Graetz built that idea out of passages like this one. But the sources describe a debate about two books, not a council voting on a list, and since the 1960s most scholars have given the idea up. The scriptures took their final shape slowly, without any single meeting.⁸

Check It Yourself

Look up: Ecclesiastes 2:18–23, then Luke 12:16–21.

You will find: the Teacher’s question about who gets your wealth, and my story that asks it again.

Then read Ecclesiastes 5:8–12. See how the Teacher describes power over the poor.

The Short Version

• The key word is hevel, breath or vapor: life is brief and cannot be held.
• The Teacher speaks as Solomon, but the book was written centuries later.
• He sees the tears of the oppressed and officials stacked on officials grinding down the poor.
• His advice: eat your bread with joy, love the people you love, do your work well.
• My rich fool parable asks the Teacher’s question: whose will they be?