Everything
is hevel.

The Bible’s Only Philosopher

One man, a pen, a sheet of paper, and a problem that will not let him go to his grave in peace.

Open your Bible, ladies and gentlemen, turn past the prophets and the psalms, and you will come upon something that ought to startle you. Twelve short chapters. You can read the whole thing in about an hour. And yet it is, I would say, the most concentrated dose of provocation anywhere in the Hebrew canon. It is the only book of the Bible that we would recognize, without too much squinting, as philosophy.

Now, let me be careful here. The Bible is full of philosophical questions. Samuel and Kings are extended meditations on political power. Genesis and Deuteronomy are shot through with questions about the nature of God, law, and obligation. Job wrestles, magnificently, with the suffering of the righteous. But in every one of those books the questions come to us wrapped in something else: in narrative, in law, in prophecy, in a story with characters who speak to one another. Ecclesiastes has none of that. It is one man, sitting with a pen, reflecting, asking questions, and trying to answer them with a certain self-awareness that we recognize as philosophical. And his method is empirical and autobiographical. He tells us what he has seen.

Who is he? The book calls him Kohelet, from the Hebrew root meaning to gather. It is not entirely clear what he gathers. Some say people, making him a kind of street preacher or popular philosopher. Others say sayings, making him a collector of maxims. For most of history he was simply Solomon, since the opening verse gives us “the son of David, king in Jerusalem” 1:1. But the language gives the game away. There are Persian loanwords, a great deal of Aramaic, the word zman for time, which appears over and over. And the book seems to be in conversation with the Stoics and the Epicureans, with the philosophies that came flooding into the Near East after Alexander’s armies swept through in the 320s. My best guess, and it is the consensus of most scholars, is that Kohelet lived in Judea, probably near Jerusalem, sometime around the third century before the common era. Some seven hundred years after Solomon.

He belongs to a genre scholars call wisdom literature, which you find everywhere in the ancient world: Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Israelite. Wisdom is universal, it is practical, and it usually comes to us as the maxim, the aphorism, a sentence compact enough to travel from mouth to mouth and culture to culture. And most wisdom literature rests on an assumption, certainly the Book of Proverbs does, that there is an order in the world. A kind of moral karma. The Germans have a word for it, the connection between deed and consequence. Sow in the morning, reap in the evening. Do good to your neighbour and your neighbour will do good to you.

Ecclesiastes belongs to this genre, and it undermines it very seriously. It is one of the great protests within wisdom. It says: no. The world is not like that at all. There is injustice in the world, and what is worse, there is futility, because everyone ends up in the same place. It does not matter whether you were good. It does not matter whether you were wicked. Everyone goes into the ground. Everyone decomposes. Everyone is forgotten.

Notice, too, what the book leaves out, because it is quite as important as what it contains. There is no Israel in Ecclesiastes. No Torah, no commandments, no covenant, no land to be conquered or defended. Even God is not addressed by the four-letter name but as Elohim, a more universal and more general deity. It is almost startling to turn the page from the prophets and the Pentateuch and find someone who is simply not interested in any of it. The result is a book that can be, and has been, read by anyone, anywhere, at any time.

Finally, a word on how to read him. Kohelet contradicts himself. He says one thing and then, sometimes immediately and sometimes several chapters later, he says the opposite. Some scholars see several hands at work, an original philosopher with pious glosses layered on top. Others imagine a dialogue, a sort of symposium with different characters. I find neither convincing. I would suggest that the book is coherent precisely in its contradictions, not because Kohelet is confused, but because he is an old man who has observed contradictions in the world. Life is orderly and full of pleasure and opportunity. Life is also futile, oppressive, and indifferent to us. Both are true, and they live in tension. A philosopher who lets them stand side by side is, I think, more faithful to human experience than one who, like Spinoza, insists that everything must fit neatly with everything else.

So there he sits: learned, probably wealthy, certainly old, well read in both Greek philosophy and the Israelite wisdom tradition. And he has a problem. A deep, dark, complex problem that torments him and will not let him rest. He cannot go to his grave, at least, without saying it out loud.

Breath, Vapor, Vanity

The whole problem of the book can be summed up in one Hebrew word. The difficulty is translating it.

The problem Ecclesiastes faces, ladies and gentlemen, fits in a single Hebrew word: hevel. It appears nearly forty times in the book, and it is applied to almost everything that exists. “Havel havalim,” the book opens 1:2. Everything is hevel.

Its physical meaning is easy. Hevel is breath. It is vapor. Go outside on a cold morning and exhale, and you will see it hang in the air for a moment and then disappear. That is hevel. But in Kohelet the word carries at least three freights at once. First, the fleeting: here today, gone tomorrow, with no permanence at all. Second, the trivial: meaningless, absurd, not to be taken seriously. And third, something closer to the unjust: a thing that is disordered, not as it ought to be, with something deeply wrong at its heart.

No English word captures all three. The King James gave us “vanity,” from Jerome’s vanitas, and it has become famous. But vanity in the twenty-first century means self-regard; we sit at a vanity table to look at ourselves in the mirror. Others have offered futility, meaninglessness, emptiness. The late Michael Fox, in his superb commentary, chose “absurdity,” tying Kohelet to Camus and the existentialists: a world where consequences do not follow from actions. My own preference is “futility,” or better yet “vain” in the sense of in vain, because it does two things at once. It describes something as fleeting, and it condemns it. It is not merely a description. It is a judgment. To say something is in vain is to say it is not worth the investment, because in the end it will come to nothing.

Now read the first chapter 1:3–1:11, and I think you will agree with me that it is an absolute bomb. A generation goes, a generation comes, and the earth stands forever. The sun rises, the sun sets, and hurries back to where it rose. The wind blows south, turns north, goes round and round. All the rivers run into the sea, and the sea is never full. Careful readers will notice all four ancient elements are here: earth, fire in the sun, air in the wind, water in the rivers. The great processes of nature grind on forever, and set against them, human life is nothing. Get married, win the lottery, and the sun will rise in the east tomorrow. Lose the war, lose your family, lose your whole city in a flood, and the sun will rise in the east tomorrow. You do not matter. Forget the eternal perspective: even from the perspective of nature’s ordinary rhythms, our concerns are completely inconsequential.

The poem closes with a quiet but devastating move. “There is no remembrance of former things” 1:11. Open Homer and you will find kleos, glory, the fame that echoes down the ages and grants a semblance of immortality. Kohelet shuts that door. No one will remember you, and even if they did, it would not matter, because they too will die.

Then he puts on the mantle of a king 2:4–2:11. I built houses, I planted vineyards, I made gardens and pools, I gathered silver and gold, singers, concubines, the treasures of kings. Whatever my eyes desired I did not withhold. It is the equivalent, today, of someone who has run Tesla, won the Nobel Prize in Literature, been elected President, and received tenure. Everything you could want on a résumé, he has on his résumé. And he looks at all of it and says: hevel, and a chasing after wind.

And so the list grows. Oppression is hevel: the tears of the oppressed, and no one to comfort them 4:1. Rivalry is hevel: every skill and every labor springs from envy of one’s neighbour 4:4. Wealth is hevel, because you cannot take it with you, and a stranger will enjoy it 6:2. There are no pockets in a shroud, as the saying goes. Worse still, the righteous perish in their righteousness and the wicked live long in their wickedness 7:15. The Hebrew is sharper than most translations: not despite, but through, because of. The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, for time and chance happen to them all 9:11.

What is the emotional register of all this? Some imagine Kohelet as a detached observer, shrugging at the universe. No. “So I hated life” 2:17. There is rage here. There is protest. As my students might say, Ecclesiastes is not just a book. It is a mood. And it is a mood that refuses to accept things as they are and demands to know whether there is any way out.

Joy, Sharpened by Futility

Kohelet will not revise his diagnosis. But he does leave us three ways to live with it.

Before we ask what Kohelet offers, ladies and gentlemen, it is just as important to notice what he refuses to offer. First, he never revises the diagnosis. The last words he speaks, “futility of futilities, all is futility” 12:8, precisely mirror the first 1:2. The book is a palindrome of despair, read forwards or backwards. There is no escape hatch, no quiet admission that he overstated the case.

Second, and this is the one that has been ignored by the vast majority of religious commentators for two thousand years, he refuses the afterlife. You would be shocked, perhaps, to learn that nowhere in the Hebrew Bible is there an explicit doctrine of reward after death. Job could have used it; it would have been the obvious answer. Deuteronomy promises rain and prosperity and long life on the land, never heaven. There is only Sheol, a shadowy underworld not unlike Homer’s Hades. And the very first time the Bible seems to entertain the possibility that the human spirit goes somewhere, it is here, and Kohelet casts doubt on it: “Who knows whether the spirit of man goes upward and the spirit of the beast goes downward to the earth?” 3:21. Who knows. Maybe. We have no idea.

Third, he refuses the consolation of knowledge. Bertrand Russell, in “A Free Man’s Worship,” which is to my mind the most spiritually beautiful thing ever written by an atheist, argues that to think greatly of fate, to feel its passionless splendour, is itself a kind of freedom. Kohelet will have none of it 2:13–2:16. Yes, wisdom excels folly as light excels darkness. And yet the same fate befalls them both. The wise man dies just like the fool. Good for you that you are wise. It does not save you.

So what remains? I would like to propose three answers that run through the book. The first is what I call an ethic of alignment, and it lives in the most famous poem Kohelet ever wrote 3:1–3:8. A time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot. Some read the poem as more of the problem: a life of arbitrary seasons, none of them meaning anything. I read it as part of the solution. Even if the landscape ends, it is still a landscape. There are peaks and troughs, rivers and forests. Life under hevel is not a flat, featureless wasteland, and so it can still be lived well or badly. Know when it is time to plant and when to uproot, time for war and time for peace, and you can work with the grain of the world instead of bashing your head against it. Marcus Aurelius makes much the same case. So, in his bleak way, does Hesiod in the Works and Days.

The second answer is joy, but a particular kind. You can feel the Epicureans in the room here: not wild hedonism, which only produces hangovers, but the moderate pleasures of the garden, cheese and olives and good company. “Go, eat your bread with joy, and drink your wine with a merry heart … let your garments be always white, and let your head lack no oil. Enjoy life with the wife whom you love, all the days of your life of hevel” 9:7–9:9. And here is the kicker. He brings in futility precisely here, because it is precisely your knowledge that life is fleeting that lets you taste these small joys. A simple meal. A beautiful evening. A walk with those you love. They are sweet because they will not last. Hevel does not only threaten joy. It sharpens it.

The third answer I do not want to overstate. Kohelet is not an atheist tract. It is not Camus or Sartre. God appears some forty times, and Kohelet believes in a higher order even if he cannot see it. “He has made everything beautiful in its time; also He has set eternity in their heart, yet so that man cannot find out the work that God has done from beginning to end” 3:11. The problem of hevel, then, may be an us problem, not a world problem, and certainly not a God problem. It is the problem of creatures with hard limits on what they can know. That leaves a door ajar. Hevel might be all we experience. It might not be all there is.

So: no revised diagnosis, no afterlife, no redemption through knowledge. But alignment with the world’s rhythms, joy sharpened by brevity, and reverence before a mystery we cannot penetrate. It is not a comfortable answer. It is, I think, an honest one.

The Distant God and the Lonely Man

God is everywhere in Ecclesiastes and reachable nowhere. And the man asking the questions is utterly alone.

Those who think of Ecclesiastes as a secular book, ladies and gentlemen, have not counted. God is mentioned around forty times. He is everywhere. But He is a very different God from the one you meet in the rest of the Hebrew Bible, and the difference can be summed up in a phrase: He is incommunicado.

There is no prayer in Ecclesiastes. There is no revelation. No one speaks to God and God speaks to no one. When Kohelet sees the tears of the oppressed, a Psalm would tell them to cry out to the Lord. Job would at least demand an audience. Kohelet simply records that they have no comforter 4:1. There is an abyss between heaven and earth, and the path of rescue, let us say, is closed.

And yet this distant God is sovereign over absolutely everything. He gives wealth; He gives, separately, the ability to enjoy it 5:17–5:18. He gives the few days of your futile life. Whether this is an intimate providence arranging every circumstance, or something far more remote, a deity who set the universe in motion and lets it unfold, the book never quite says. “Whatever God does, it shall be forever; nothing can be added to it, nor anything taken from it” 3:14.

Which raises the question of determinism. Is humanity just a set of automata, as some Stoics thought? I do not think Kohelet is a determinist. He gives us too much advice: do this, do not do that, this is the better way. If our choices meant nothing, why bother? I would call him a fatalist instead. We can act, we can even influence things a little, but the ultimate outcome, rich or poor, long life or short, is not in our hands. That is what makes human beings, in his eyes, such tragic creatures.

His advice on religion itself is, for a biblical book, astonishing 4:17–5:6. “Guard your steps when you go to the house of God.” Do not be rash with your mouth. Let your words be few, for God is in heaven and you are on earth. Better not to vow than to vow and fail to pay. In other words: tread carefully. Do not throw yourself into the machinery of sacrifices and vows and prayers, because human beings are bad at keeping promises, and you will not justify yourself that way. Rather, fear God. Submit, accept, stay who you are. In a Bible full of temple and offering, this is deeply subversive.

Then there is amal, toil 1:3. In Genesis it is Adam’s curse: the stingy earth that gives up its bread only by the sweat of your brow. In Job it is a trial. In Kohelet it is worse than either, because it is simply the human condition. There is no life without it, and there is no guarantee it produces anything. Even when it succeeds, as in the palaces and gardens of chapter two, it is doomed anyway. Add to this the limits of wisdom 8:16–8:17: even if a wise man claims to know, he cannot find it out. For a book that belongs to the wisdom tradition, that is a remarkable admission.

But here is what I find most striking, and, I confess, most unsatisfying. Kohelet is a radical individualist. He has no wife we meet, no children, no parents, no tribe, no nation. He is the ancient equivalent of a brain in a vat. Read chapter two and count the first-person pronouns: I built, I planted, I made, I gathered, I saw, I said. In the ancient world that is almost eerie. People understood themselves as links in a chain: family, tribe, class, faith. The autonomous individual is a very modern invention, which is precisely why Kohelet speaks so directly to disillusioned modern readers. Twenty-three centuries ago someone felt exactly what I feel.

And yet, to those of us rooted in family and community, his words ring a little hollow. Yes, I will die. But I am not just me. I have children, and I hope my values will pass to them and to theirs. I belong to my parents and siblings, to my community, to the Jewish people, to my country, to Western civilization, to humanity. The ripples of a life spread outward. Kohelet never considers that the wider your unit of meaning, the less hevel can reach it. His critique is sharp and important. But for those trying to live well within a web of others, it is not the whole truth.

Before the Silver Cord Is Snapped

One of the most haunting reflections on death anywhere in literature, read slowly.

Death stalks Ecclesiastes, ladies and gentlemen, from the first page to the last. It is the engine of hevel. “There is one event to the righteous and to the wicked, to the good, to the clean and the unclean, to him who sacrifices and to him who does not” 9:2. Death is the great leveller. It erases moral distinctions, social distinctions, every distinction you care to name. And it is the great silencer. “A living dog is better than a dead lion” 9:4.

But it is not only death that troubles Kohelet. It is the manner of our going: the long, laborious, painful business of growing old. Remember that he is an old man. Looking back, he condemns everything he has attempted. Looking forward, what stares him in the face is his own disintegration.

He prepares the ground at the end of chapter eleven 11:7–11:10. “Truly the light is sweet, and it is pleasant for the eyes to see the sun.” Rejoice, then, in all your years. But remember the days of darkness, for they will be many. And: “Rejoice, young man, in your youth … walk in the ways of your heart and in the sight of your eyes.” This is an almost exact inversion of the Torah’s warning not to go after your heart and your eyes, and it caused the commentators no end of headaches. But he adds at once: know that God will bring you into judgment. Live, and live well. Just carry the ticking clock with you.

Then comes the poem of chapter twelve 12:1–12:7. Remember your Creator in the days of your youth, before the evil days come. Before the sun and the light and the moon and the stars are darkened. When the keepers of the house tremble and the strong men bow themselves, when the grinders cease because they are few, and those who look out of the windows are darkened. When the almond tree blossoms, the grasshopper drags itself along, and desire fails, because man goes to his eternal home and the mourners go about the streets. Before the silver cord is snapped and the golden bowl is broken, and the pitcher shattered at the fountain. Then the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the spirit returns to God who gave it.

How should we read it? The plain reading is of a household, a village, winding down around the death of the great man at its centre. The women stop singing, the mills fall silent, the windows darken. It puts me in mind of Auden: stop all the clocks. Everything pauses in grief because the person at the centre of it all is gone.

The reading most commentators prefer is of the aging body itself. The keepers of the house are the trembling hands, the grinders are the teeth, the windows are the eyes, the almond blossom is white hair, the caper-berry that no longer works is desire. One by one, everything shuts down. And this is not a relic of antiquity; it is one of the most divisive conversations of our own day: is growing old always preferable to the alternative?

And there is a third reading, of the death not of one person but of the whole species. Kohelet’s contemporaries were writing apocalypses, visions of the end of days full of cosmic upheaval. Kohelet holds up a dark mirror to them. Not a bang, but a slow decline: the songs grow softer, the trees stop blossoming, one thing after another breaks down, until the dust returns to the earth. If even humanity is a blip, what are we?

And then he ends, as he began: “Futility of futilities, says Kohelet, all is futility” 12:8. The circle closes. Nothing arrives at a destination.

Except that another voice now takes over, the editor 12:9–12:14. He calls Kohelet a sage who taught the people knowledge, which, given how thoroughly the book undermines wisdom, is revolutionary. He calls the words of the wise goads, sharp things that prod the flock along. And then: “The end of the matter, all having been heard: fear God and keep His commandments, for this is the whole of man.” On its face this has nothing to do with the book it concludes. The usual reading is that he is sanitizing Kohelet to smuggle him into the canon. I think that is too harsh. I think he is assimilating Kohelet. He is saying: this voice is wise, irreducible, necessary. But no healthy life can be built on it alone. Put it on the shelf, among the other books, inside a life of duty and reverence. Trying to build an entire life on Kohelet is, to my mind, a very ill-advised thing to do. Kohelet as one voice among many is a very wise thing indeed.

A Mirror for Every Age

Twenty-three centuries of readers looked into Ecclesiastes and saw, more or less, themselves.

It is not at all obvious, ladies and gentlemen, that Ecclesiastes should be in the Bible. The Wisdom of Ben Sira, written perhaps fifty to a hundred years later, is longer, more traditional, more pious, far more at home among Israel’s wisdom books. Ben Sira was left out. Kohelet, shorter, sharper, and far more subversive, got in. We do not really know how or when these final canonical decisions were made; it is one of the famously opaque corners of history. But we do know it was argued over. The Mishnah preserves a debate over Ecclesiastes and the Song of Songs. The Talmud (Shabbat 30b) records that the sages sought to suppress the book because its words contradict one another, and that they kept it because its beginning and its end are words of Torah.

Once a book is canonical, it must be interpreted. And a book that seems to say heretical things must be reinterpreted. What follows is a whistle-stop tour of that history, and I think you will see just how elastic, how rich, and how elusive this book really is.

The rabbis of the midrash, in Kohelet Rabbah and the Aramaic Targum, turned the book in their own image. Eating and drinking 2:24 became good deeds; joy became the study of Torah. “Under the sun” 1:3 meant the physical world, which may well be futile, while the things above the sun, the soul and the world to come, were untouched. They noticed that Kohelet says “I was king over Israel” 1:12, in the past tense, and spun a wonderful story of Solomon deposed for his sins, wandering the earth as a beggar, gathering wisdom, and finally returning to his throne. None of this is in the Bible. It is midrash at its most inventive.

The Church Fathers were no less creative. Jerome, who gave us both the Latin Vulgate and the name Ecclesiastes and the phrase vanitas vanitatum, turned the book into an ascetic manual, a treatise of contemptus mundi: contempt for the world in favour of the spirit. Ambrose of Milan read it the same way. Eating and drinking became the sacrament.

Then the literalists. Rashi largely followed the rabbis, but his grandson Rashbam, in twelfth-century France, wanted the plain meaning. He saw the heart of the book in the opening poem 1:4–1:7: human life is fleeting set against the great processes of nature, and it is good for us to keep that before our eyes. And, astonishingly, he seems to have been the first commentator in any tradition to notice that the closing verses 12:9 were written by someone else, a glossator. Historical-critical consciousness in the twelfth century.

Martin Luther, in 1532, overturned the ascetics entirely. The book, he said, does not condemn the things of the world, which are gifts of God to be enjoyed; it condemns our misuse of them, our turning pleasure into an end in itself. Luther also guessed, without any of our philological equipment, that the book was not Solomon’s and belonged near the time of the Maccabees. Hugo Grotius in 1644 read it as natural philosophy: prudence, moderation, humanity’s proper place in the web of causes. Moses Mendelssohn, in his early commentary, swept away centuries of allegory in the name of the plain grammatical sense, and found a universal moralist who teaches moderation, patience, and, surprisingly, the afterlife. Herder, the Romantic, loved it as wisdom born of experience, of going out into the world and having your heart broken and writing it down.

Kierkegaard distinguished a shallow futility that breeds despair from a deeper one that goads you toward faith. And Michael Fox, as I mentioned, heard in hevel Camus’s absurd, a world where deed and consequence have come unstuck. I am not fully convinced. But it shows these questions are still being asked, twenty-three centuries later.

I want to end with a favourite of mine, Samuel David Luzzatto, the nineteenth-century Italian polymath. At twenty he wrote a commentary on Ecclesiastes that condemned the book outright. How can a man say that a home and a family and a life are futile? What heresy is this? Then he put the commentary in a drawer. Forty years later, at sixty, he published it, with a note. Having seen the world, he said, he had changed his mind. Those who live for themselves, for their own gratification, really do live lives of hevel, and when they end, everything ends. But those who live for others, for things greater than themselves, their lives are not hevel. Their ripples outlast them.

That, I think, is how to hold this book. It cannot be the sum of a philosophy. But as one voice in a wider conversation it is indispensable. There are ways of living that are futile, and there are ways that are not. Ecclesiastes belongs on the bookshelf of every philosopher and every reader of the Bible. It just cannot be the only book on the shelf.