Ecclesiastes 1: Nothing New Under the Sun

"The words of the Preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem" (1:1). The Hebrew title is Qoheleth, a word built from qahal, "assembly." It looks like a title or role (someone who gathers, or speaks to, an assembly) rather than a personal name. The Greek translators rendered it Ekklesiastes, "member of (or speaker in) the ekklesia, the assembly," and the Latin kept the Greek word: hence "Ecclesiastes." Luther's Prediger gave English its "Preacher"; many modern versions say "the Teacher." Each is an interpretation of a word whose exact sense is debated.

"Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity" (1:2). In Hebrew the verse is five times one word: havel havalim… havel havalim… hakkol havel. Hevel is breath: the visible puff on a cold morning, the steam over a pot. "Havel havalim" is a superlative, like "song of songs" or "holy of holies": the most fleeting of the fleeting. Then the question: "What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun?" (1:3). Yitron, "profit," is an accountant's word, what is left over when the books are closed. Amal is labor with its weariness. The book has asked its question: after all the work, what remains?

"One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever" (1:4). The sun rises, sets and "hasteth" (literally "pants") back to where it rises (v. 5). The wind goes south, turns north, "whirleth about continually" (v. 6). "All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full" (v. 7). Everything moves; nothing arrives. Human beings are the same: "the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing" (v. 8).

"The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be… and there is no new thing under the sun" (1:9). If someone says "See, this is new," it was already here "of old time" (v. 10). The real loss is memory: "There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after" (v. 11).

Now the speaker steps forward: "I the Preacher was king over Israel in Jerusalem" (1:12). He set his heart "to seek and search out by wisdom concerning all things that are done under heaven" and found it "sore travail" that God has given people to be busy with (v. 13). Everything he saw was "vanity and vexation of spirit," or more literally "breath and a chasing of wind" (v. 14). "That which is crooked cannot be made straight: and that which is wanting cannot be numbered" (v. 15). He grew in wisdom beyond all before him in Jerusalem (v. 16), turned to know wisdom and also "madness and folly" (v. 17), and concluded: "in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow" (v. 18).

Five key words, counted

The site counted the book's key words in the library's Hebrew (Westminster Leningrad Codex), with the method published as a script: hevel occurs 38 times in 30 verses; amal (toil, to toil) 35 times; yitron (profit) 10 times; ruach (wind, breath, spirit) 24 times; heleq (portion) 8 times. "Under the sun" occurs 29 times, "under heaven" 3 times, and the paired phrases "pursuit of wind" (re'ut ruach) 7 times and "shepherding of wind" (ra'yon ruach) twice. Chapter 1 already uses hevel, yitron, amal and ruach.

The natural world in 1:4–7

The poem watches the same things a Judean farmer would: sunrise, the seasonal shift between south and north winds, wadis running to the Dead Sea or the Mediterranean that never overflow. Verse 7 is sometimes cited as an ancient description of the water cycle. The verse says only that rivers keep flowing to a sea that never fills and return "to the place from whence the rivers come"; it does not explain evaporation or rain. It is an observation turned into a picture of endless motion, and reading modern hydrology into it claims more than the text says.

A king in Jerusalem

Qoheleth is "son of David, king in Jerusalem" (1:1) and "king over Israel in Jerusalem" (1:12). Only Solomon was son of David and king over all Israel in Jerusalem, so readers have long heard Solomon's voice here, especially in chapter 2. Yet the name Solomon never appears in the book, and 1:16 ("all they that have been before me in Jerusalem") implies many earlier kings in Jerusalem, which fits Solomon awkwardly since only David preceded him there. The royal voice is examined in the investigation "Who Was Qoheleth?"

What does hevel mean here?

In 1:2 hevel is a summary verdict on "all." Translators divide: "vanity" (KJV, from the Latin vanitas, "emptiness") makes it a judgment of worthlessness; "meaningless" (NIV 1984) a judgment of sense; "futility" (NJPS, NRSV in places) a judgment of outcome; "absurd" (M. V. Fox) a judgment of the mismatch between what should happen and what does; "mere breath" or "vapor" keeps the image and lets context decide. The book itself uses hevel for things that are brief (6:12; 11:10), unjust (8:14), unsatisfying (2:1) and incomprehensible (8:10). The site keeps "breath" or "vapor" as the image and names the sense each passage supports.

"Under the sun" is a viewpoint, not a denial of God

"Under the sun" marks the field of observation: life as anyone can see it in this world. It does not mean Qoheleth leaves God out. God appears about forty times in the book, as the one who gives "sore travail" (1:13), gifts of joy (2:24), times and eternity (3:11) and judgment (3:17; 11:9). The book's question is what human beings can secure and know within the world God has made.

1:15 and 1:18: limits, not resignation

"That which is crooked cannot be made straight" (1:15) recurs as a question in 7:13 ("who can make that straight, which he hath made crooked?"). It names limits of human power; it is not a command to leave injustice alone, which the book laments repeatedly (3:16; 4:1; 5:8). Verse 18 ("he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow") answers the confident wisdom of Proverbs ("wisdom is better than rubies," Proverbs 8:11): more knowledge also means seeing more of what cannot be fixed. Ecclesiastes still prefers wisdom to folly (2:13); it denies that wisdom brings mastery.

The witnesses

Hebrew, Greek, Latin and English agree closely in this chapter. Differences are interpretive: the Greek renders re'ut ruach (1:14) as proairesis pneumatos, "a choice (or purpose) of spirit" (Giguet "présomption d'esprit"); the Vulgate makes 1:15 a moral maxim, "the perverse are hard to correct, and the number of fools is infinite" (perversi difficile corriguntur, et stultorum infinitus est numerus), a famous Latin rendering that is Jerome's interpretation, not a different Hebrew text. The library's Greek also adds "of Israel" to the title (1:1, "roi d'Israël en Jérusalem"). The Qumran fragment 4Q110 (4QQoh-b) is reported to preserve parts of 1:10–15; one scholarly survey reports extra wording after 1:14. That reading is not printed here until it is checked against the critical edition (DJD XVI) and the photographs.

"Under the sun" outside the Bible

The phrase occurs nowhere else in the Hebrew Bible, but it does occur in Phoenician: the 5th-century BC sarcophagi of two kings of Sidon, Tabnit and Eshmunazar II, curse anyone who disturbs the tomb to have "no seed among the living under the sun" (paraphrased; exact wording is a C check, EC-C08). There, as in Ecclesiastes, "under the sun" means the world of the living. The parallel shows the expression belonged to the wider Northwest Semitic language of life and death; it does not date Ecclesiastes.

Reception: Sukkot

In many Jewish communities (especially Ashkenazi) Ecclesiastes is read publicly on the Sabbath of Sukkot, the Feast of Booths (when Sukkot has no Sabbath, on Shemini Atzeret). Sukkot is the joyful harvest festival lived in temporary shelters; reading a book about life's brevity amid the joy is part of the custom's meaning. Customs vary between communities.