Book of Ecclesiastes
Everything Is Meaningless
1 The words of the Teacher, son of David, king in Jerusalem:
2 “Meaningless! Meaningless!”
says the Teacher.
“Utterly meaningless!
Everything is meaningless.”
3 What do people gain from all their labors
at which they toil under the sun?
4 Generations come and generations go,
but the earth remains forever.
5 The sun rises and the sun sets,
and hurries back to where it rises.
6 The wind blows to the south
and turns to the north;
round and round it goes,
ever returning on its course.
7 All streams flow into the sea,
yet the sea is never full.
To the place the streams come from,
there they return again.
8 All things are wearisome,
more than one can say.
The eye never has enough of seeing,
nor the ear, its fill of hearing.
9 What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
There is nothing new under the sun.
10 Is there anything of which one can say,
“Look! This is something new”?
It was here already, long ago;
It was here before our time.
11 No one remembers the former generations,
and even those yet to come
will not be remembered
by those who follow them.
Personal Reflection:
This is one of the oldest and most profound pieces of writing in human history, drawn from the Book of Ecclesiastes in the Hebrew Holy Bible. It is the opening cry of a king, a man who has everything, and yet finds himself standing before the vastness of existence, whispering: what is the point?
The Teacher, a poet-philosopher, speaks through the voice of King Solomon around 2,500 years ago. The opening stanza begins with "Meaningless! Meaningless!" In the original Hebrew, the word is hevel, which translates to breath or vapour. Something real, something you can feel on your skin, but impossible to hold. Gone before you can grasp it. "What do people gain from all their labours at which they toil under the sun?" A question which reinforces the fleeting nature of life, which the Teacher sees as meaningless.
The Teacher then turns to nature, the sun, the wind, the rivers, the sea, and notices something quietly devastating: the world is in endless, tireless motion, and it does not need us. The sun doesn't rise for you. The wind doesn't blow toward you. The rivers pour endlessly into a sea that is never filled, and then return to pour again. Everything is cycling, repeating, indifferent. Nature is not cruel. It is simply continuous, and we are not.
Then there is a line in this passage that feels surprisingly modern: "The eye never has enough of seeing, nor the ear its fill of hearing." Think about that. We consume endlessly, experiences, images, information, noise, and still we hunger. We scroll, we seek, we reach. The Teacher is saying this is not a new problem. This is the oldest ache in humanity. Desire does not end. It only changes shape.
Then he says that ‘there is nothing new under the sun’. Every discovery, every revolution, every moment that feels electric and unprecedented, it has, in some form, happened before. And those who lived it were forgotten. And those who forget them will themselves be forgotten also. This is not said with bitterness. It is said with the clear eyed honesty of someone who has lived long enough to watch their own certainties dissolve.
What makes this piece of writing so enduring, so alive across thousands of years, is that it does not pretend. It does not offer comfort. It simply sits in the honest and uncomfortable space of the human condition. The continuous, cyclical duality of life. Everything we think to be so terrible or so extraordinary has already happened before. It has simply been forgotten. Just as we ourselves will one day be forgotten. And the people who forget us will eventually find themselves forgotten also.
Such is the nature of life.
A Time for Everything
3
1 There is a time for everything,
and a season for every activity under the heavens:
2 a time to be born and a time to die,
a time to plant and a time to uproot,
3 a time to kill and a time to heal,
a time to tear down and a time to build,
4 a time to weep and a time to laugh,
a time to mourn and a time to dance,
5 a time to scatter stones and atime to gather them,
a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,
6 a time to search and a time to give up,
a time to keep and a time to throw away,
7 a time to tear and a time to mend,
a time to be silent and a time to speak,
8 a time to love and a time to hate,
a time for war and a time for peace.
9 What do workers gain from their toil? 10 I have seen the burden God has laid on the human race. 11 He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end. 12 I know that there is nothing better for people than to be happy and to do good while they live. 13 That each of them may eat and drink, and find satisfaction in all their toil—this is the gift of God. 14 I know that everything God does will endure forever; nothing can be added to it and nothing taken from it. God does it so that people will fear him.
Personal Reflection:
This is my favourite passage of writing in all of Ecclesiastes. It opens with a rhythm that flows like water down a peaceful stream. It talks about the duality of life. And the cyclical rhythm of life. A long, flowing list of opposites that together paint a picture of the full human experience of life. Birth and death. Planting and uprooting. Weeping and laughing. War and peace. The Teacher is not saying these things are equal or that they cancel each other out. He is saying that all of them belong. Life is not made of only the good moments, or only the hard ones, but of the whole turning cycle of both, and that there is a time and a place for every single one. A season for every one.
There is deep comfort hidden inside this list, if you are willing to sit with it. When you are in a season of weeping, it quietly reminds you that a time to laugh exists too. When you are in a time of tearing down, it whispers that building will come again. It does not promise when. It does not give you a timeline. But it holds out the truth that no season is permanent, that the wheel keeps turning, and that whatever you are living through right now is not the whole of your story.
Then the Teacher pauses and asks the same question he always returns to. ‘What do workers gain from their toil’ ? And here something shifts. Rather than landing back in despair, he offers something hopeful. He says that God has made everything beautiful in its time. Not everything feels beautiful. Not everything looks beautiful. But in its time, seen from the right distance, with the right eyes, there is beauty to even the most difficult and broken seasons of a life.
And then comes one of the most popular lines in the entire book. ‘He has set eternity in the human heart’. This is the Teacher naming something we all feel but struggle to put into words. There is something inside us that reaches beyond the present moment, beyond our own small lives, toward something larger and longer and deeper. We were made, it seems, to sense eternity. And yet we cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end. We carry the longing for the whole picture while only ever being able to see a single frame. That tension, between the eternity we sense and the limits we live within, is one of the defining aches of being human.
In the face of all this, the Teacher arrives at something that feels like grace. There is nothing better for people than to be happy, to do good, to eat and drink and find satisfaction in their work. These simple, ordinary things are the gift of God. Not monuments. Not legacy. Not the accumulation of wisdom or wealth or pleasure. Just the quiet, present, daily gift of being alive and noticing it. Feeling the sun. Hearing a voice you love. Being in the room. Being present enough to know that this moment, unremarkable as it may seem, is the whole of it.
The last line where the teacher says “God does it so that people will fear him”, does not mean fear in the modern english sense of terror or dread. In the original Hebrew the word is yirah, which is better understood as awe, reverence, and humble respect. The feeling you get standing at the edge of the ocean at night. Not frightened, but made small.
God has designed existence to be deliberately beyond our full understanding. He has made everything beautiful in its time, placed eternity in our hearts so we can sense the bigness of it all, and yet kept the full picture just out of reach. We can feel it but never fully grasp it. We can sense the pattern but never see the whole design.
And that gap, that space between what we can feel and what we can fully know, is precisely what produces reverence. It keeps us humble. It stops us from believing we have it all figured out. It reminds us that we are not in control, that something larger than us is at work, and that our role is not to master existence but to live within it gratefully and honestly.
It suggests to stop striving to control and accumulate and understand everything. Instead, stand in awe of what you cannot control or fully understand. Let that awe make you present. Let it make you humble. Let it point you back to the simple gift of being alive in a world far bigger and more beautiful than you will ever completely fathom.
It is less about fear and more about wonder.
Conclusion
In the last month of my wife's life, she found solace in me reading to her. Specifically the Bible. As we lay in the hospice room together at night, I would read to her slowly and calmly, and the first book I opened was the Book of Ecclesiastes. Page 1298 in my Bible. We both found solace in reading scripture. In reading the word of God. In experiencing the grace of scripture. I will never forget how those words struck a chord in my heart.
The opening line: “Meaningless! Meaningless”!
In any other moment of my life, those words might have felt bleak. But in that room, beside her, they felt like the truest thing I had ever heard. Because the world had already shown me, in the most devastating way possible, that everything I thought mattered, the career I was building, the status I had imagined for myself, the things I had wanted to own and achieve and become, none of it had shown up in that room with me. None of it had any weight beside the reality of her hand in mine and the sound of her breathing in the dark.
What I experienced, without a name for it at the time, was something like an ego death. The version of myself assembled carefully over twenty three years, built from ambition and comparison and the quiet anxious need to be seen as something, simply fell away. There was nothing left to protect it. The cancer had walked into the room and looked at all of it and it had meant nothing. What remained was just me. A young man who loved his wife and was terrified, doing the only thing he could think to do. Show up every night and read to her, so that her last weeks on earth were filled with something beautiful.
‘What do people gain from all their labours at which they toil under the sun? Generations come and generations go, but the earth remains forever’.
Facing mortality so tragically alongside her, this question hit differently. What is the genuine point of all this toil we consume ourselves with?
The Teacher had stood in the middle of his extraordinary life and felt the same hollow truth that settles over every human life eventually, some just much sooner than others. That none of the things we chase are the thing. That the wind keeps blowing. That generations come and go and the earth remains, and that in the face of all that continuity, a human life is a breath. Real and felt and gone.
But the Teacher did not leave us in despair. He said that God has made everything beautiful in its time. That there is nothing better than to be present, to find what is good in the days you are given, to love and do good and let the simple fact of being alive be enough. Because it is enough. It is everything.
My wife, twenty one years old with her whole life rewritten by something she never asked for, found peace in those words. Night after night in the quiet of that room, she listened to my voice moving through ancient poetry and she found that it held her. That it named something she felt but could not say. That what we were living was not outside of the story of what it means to be human. It was the very centre of it.
Because here is what is true. The people we love are not the background to our lives. They are the life. The hand held in the dark is the life. The voice reading in the quiet is the life. The ordinary, heartbreaking gift of being fully present with someone, with nothing left to hide behind and nothing left to prove, that is the whole of it. That is what the Teacher spent a lifetime of wisdom arriving at. That is what I learned in a hospice room beside my dying wife, far too young, far too soon, and with a clarity that most people spend their entire lives searching for.
The world keeps moving. The sun keeps rising. The rivers keep running to a sea that is never full. And somewhere in that great turning wheel of existence, a young woman found a glimmer of peace, and a young man found a wealth of truth, and together in a quiet room they understood something the Teacher had been trying to tell us for thousands of years.
That love is not meaningless. That presence is not meaningless. That to sit beside someone you love in their darkest hour is the most sacred thing a human being can do.
Everything else is a chasing of the wind.
References:
Holy Bible. (2011). Holy Bible: New International Version. Biblica.
