The Book of Ecclesiastes

The book of Ecclesiastes is the most lucid meditation in all the Bible on the meaning of life. Its author, who calls himself Qoheleth, looks squarely at the flight of time, the death that levels all, the vanity of human effort, and he dares a question few books pose so bluntly: what is left, in the end, of all a person’s toil? He offers no easy recipe; he searches, he doubts, he observes. But at the end of this long gaze, he gives an answer of great peace: to receive each day as a gift of God and, in the last word of the book, to fear God and keep his commandments.

Qoheleth, a sage who questions

The very name of the author sets the tone. Qoheleth comes from the Hebrew qahal (קהל), the assembly: he is the one who speaks before the assembly, the gatherer, the preacher. The Greek translators rendered it ekklēsiastēs, whence our Ecclesiastes. Like the other wisdom books, it places itself under the name of Solomon, the wise king, without ever naming him: the author speaks as a king of Jerusalem who has had everything and tried everything, to give his meditation the authority of the fullest experience. The book is not a narrative but a long personal reflection, in twelve chapters, grave in tone, almost disillusioned, and of a rare honesty. It questions more than it teaches: instead of giving ready-made rules, it poses the great questions that every person ends up asking about his own life.

A breath of breaths

One word returns like a refrain from one end of the book to the other, its master-word: “A breath, a mere breath, says Qoheleth, a breath, a mere breath: everything is a breath.” Ecclesiastes 1:2 The Hebrew word is hevel (הֶבֶל), the breath, the mist, the vapor that rises a moment and vanishes. It is often translated "vanity," but its first image is that of a breath one sees in the cold and which disappears at once. By repeating it, Qoheleth does not say that nothing has value, but that everything is fleeting, ungraspable, without lasting substance: goods, pleasures, glory, life itself slip like mist through the fingers. "A breath of breaths" is a superlative in the Hebrew manner, as "the holy of holies" names the holiest place: here, the very height of the passing.

Under the sun, nothing new

Qoheleth first confines his gaze to what he calls "under the sun," that is, all this earthly and passing world, considered without yet lifting the eyes higher. Under this horizon, he observes the endless return of the same things: the sun rises and sets only to rise again, the wind turns and returns on its course, the rivers run to the sea without ever filling it. Nature turns in circles, and man with it: “What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done: there is nothing new under the sun.” Ecclesiastes 1:9 The generations pass and forget one another. This observation is not a gratuitous pessimism: it is the lucidity of a man who refuses illusions and wants to see life as it is, so as then to seek where the true is to be found.

What profit for man?

From this gaze arises the question that runs through the whole book: “What profit does anyone gain from all the toil at which they labor under the sun?” Ecclesiastes 1:3 The word rendered "profit" is a merchant’s term: what is left, on the balance sheet, when all has been added up? If everything passes and death wipes all away, why give oneself so much trouble? This question Qoheleth does not flee; he digs it to the bottom. And it is by pushing it to its end, by showing that nothing "under the sun" gives this lasting profit, that he will open little by little toward the only one who remains, God, and toward the joy received from his hand.