Ecclesiastes’s Most Important Word: Not Fleeting But Absurd

The book of Ecclesiastes packs its most shocking yet liberating insight into a single word—a word that tells you that life won’t give you what you want or deserve. And yet receiving that shockingly bad news opens the door to help and hope.

This most important word in Ecclesiastes is also one of the hardest to translate. The Hebrew word hevel first shows up in the book’s thesis statement in 1:2, which you might be familiar with from the King James Version: “Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.” You could also translate hevel as “meaningless,” “futile,” or “fleeting.” Throughout the book, the author and protagonist, who calls himself Qohelet, examines all of life, investigating every possible pursuit and pleasure, and again and again pronounces it all hevel.

The literal meaning of hevel is “breath” or “vapor”; Psalm 62:9 says that those of low estate and high estate “are together lighter than a breath.” Based on this literal meaning, many people take hevel in Ecclesiastes to consistently mean “transient” or “fleeting.” To be sure, Ecclesiastes often pronounces something fleeting or transient to be hevel. And, in at least one place, Qohelet clearly uses hevel to mean “fleeting”: “Remove vexation from your heart, and put away pain from your body, for youth and the dawn of life are hevel” (11:10, ESV alt.).

The fact that life’s goods are all fleeting is certainly part of their problem. But to say that hevel means “fleeting” doesn’t go far enough. It doesn’t fully capture Qohelet’s basic beef with life under the sun.

What does? “Absurd.”

This word names the disconnect between what we want and what the world gives, between what we deserve and what the world returns, between what we cry out for and the world’s indifferent silence.

You could sum up Qohelet’s teaching on the world’s absurdity with three simple statements. (From here on, I’m translating hevel as “absurd” to show how it fits.)

We Don’t (Always) Get What We Want

Qohelet sought satisfaction in every conceivable source of pleasure, but he didn’t find it: “I said in my heart, ‘Come now, I will test you with pleasure; enjoy yourself.’ But behold, this also was absurd” (2:1).

The following verses tell us he sought pleasure in work, wine, women, wealth, music, and more. He indulged every conceivable appetite to the fullest extent imaginable. But at the end of it all, he tells us, “Then I considered all that my hands had done and the toil I had expended in doing it, and behold, all was absurd and a striving after wind, and there was nothing to be gained under the sun” (v. 11).

‘Absurd’ names the disconnect between what we want and what the world gives.

Why does Qohelet pronounce his pleasure-quest hevel? Because it didn’t deliver. Getting all he wanted didn’t give him what he wanted. Qohelet finds something culpably absent in each pleasure and in his whole project of maximizing pleasure. Pleasure won’t fill you; it always needs to be refilled.

Which makes a pleasure-seeking quest absurd. We don’t get what we want, sometimes because the world doesn’t give it to us but more often because even when it does, we want something else or something more.

We (Sometimes) Get What We Want

This is one of the key lessons of Qohelet’s pleasure-quest that we’ve just considered. But it’s a theme he returns to often, especially regarding money, as in 5:10: “He who loves money will not be satisfied with money, nor he who loves wealth with his income; this also is absurd.”

Many bathtubs have a small hole two-thirds of the way up their faucet side. If you fill the tub too high, water will drain automatically. The tub won’t let you overfill it and flood your house. Money isn’t like that tub. It has no automatic shut-off switch, no set stopping point. You can always get more, so you can always want more. The love of money is a treadmill and a trap. If your desired destination is more money, it will lie just beyond an ever-receding horizon.

Neither money itself nor anything money can get you will last as long as you want. As Qohelet states in one of the book’s most famous lines, “As he came from his mother’s womb he shall go again, naked as he came, and shall take nothing for his toil that he may carry away in his hand” (5:15).

What do you call a goal that many people spend their whole lives chasing, that always recedes ahead of them, and that will disappear before they know it? Absurd.

We Don’t Get What We Deserve

Here’s where “fleeting” is an especially inadequate translation of hevel. Qohelet observes, “There is an absurdity that takes place on earth, that there are righteous people to whom it happens according to the deeds of the wicked, and there are wicked people to whom it happens according to the deeds of the righteous. I said that this also is absurd” (8:14). The absurd is the gut punch of seeing someone get the opposite of what his or her character merits.

It’s as if someone switched the ledgers, as if some sick cosmic account swap occurred: The righteous receive what the wicked have earned and vice versa. This happens all the time. From courtrooms to boardrooms, this world is overflowing with people getting what they don’t deserve—often getting the very opposite of what they deserve.

We Need a Ray of Hope

Qohelet, though, has more to say about life. He also says that life is a gift (e.g., 2:24–26; 5:18–20) and that God will hold us accountable for all we do with what he gives us (11:9).

But Qohelet’s judgment that the world is absurd is the starting point of his demolition program. It’s the cornerstone in his project of devastating all the idols we willingly enslave ourselves to.

Qohelet’s diagnosis of the world’s absurdity conceals seeds of hope.

Dark though it may seem, Qohelet’s diagnosis of the world’s absurdity conceals seeds of hope. One key aspect of the absurd is the disconnect between deserving and receiving. By that measure, who in all of history lived a more absurd life than Jesus of Nazareth? But he endured ultimate absurdity not as its victim but as its undoer. By his life, death, and resurrection, Jesus experienced and exhausted and eradicated absurdity. He alone is God’s answer to your life’s absurdity.