Vanity Of Vanities

"All is meaningless--says the Teacher--meaningless, meaningless!

What profit is there for a man in all his work for which he toils under the sun?

A generation goes, a generation comes, and the earth remains forever.  The sun rises, the sun sets, hastening towards the place where it again rises.  Blowing to the south, turning to the north, the wind goes round and round and after all its rounds it has to blow again.

All rivers go to the sea, but the sea is not full; to the place where the rivers come from, there they return again.

All words become weary, and speech comes to an end, but the eye has never seen enough, nor the ear heard too much.

What has happened before will happen again; what has been done before will be done again:  there is nothing new under the sun.

If they say to you, 'See, it's new!' know that it has already been centuries earlier.

There is no remembrance of ancient people, and those to come will not be remembered by those who follow them." - Ecclesiastes 1:2-11  

(All is meaningless!  Meaningless!  We are used to the ancient translation of this verse: "Vanity of vanities.  All is vanity!"  Actually, the first word of the book designates in Hebrew a wisp of straw.  It is without weight and flies away at the slightest breeze, like vanity, a nothing.  It is also what escapes our grasp: it is a future that is uncertain and illusory, or something which does not satisfy our spirit, on which we can build nothing; it is "disconcerting," it "has no sense."

This expression is repeated in the like a refrain, but with different meanings according to the context: that is why we have recourse to different translations.

There is nothing new under the sun.  The prophets had seen the world led by GOD toward a happy future.  Other cultures, however, had the notion that the world only keeps on repeating the same events, with kingdoms, wars, success and failure.  For them, nothing was happening which could give people the fulfillment of their desires.

With such convictions, a person might try to forget what is taking place in a world where all is illusion, but that is not the case of Ecclesiastes.  Like every good Jew, he is firmly rooted in reality; he lives at a time that is without conflict and also without prophets or great hope.  In such conditions, it is wisdom to ignore the illusions of activism.

Under the sun: these words will come back as a refrain: humans toil and pass as a shadow while the sun remains.  The sun is like an image of GOD who endures and who alone does things "with a view to eternity.") 

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