The Summation

“Vanity of vanities,” says the Preacher, “Vanity of vanities! All is vanity.” Ecclesiastes 1:2 NASB

All – As the religious world finds ease in the holidays of faith, we might usefully take a longer look at the summation of life by the Preacher, Koheleth. Perhaps you know the Hebrew phrase, havel havalim (vanity of vanities). It is essentially the observation that all of life is nothing more than a few breaths. Repeated for emphasis, Koheleth’s declaration forces us to consider the real results of our time in chains here on this earth. “Chains?” you ask. Yes, for as Koheleth notices, what a man gains for all his labor under the sun is, at best, a few days of pleasure, a few nights of rest, one or two descent relationships (which end, by the way) and the inevitable grave. Why work so hard and so long if it all comes down to the worms?

Ecclesiastes is the Greek title to this book. It is derived from a Greek word meaning, “member of the assembly.” But the Hebrew title is simply the name of the author, Koheleth, the Preacher. As Michael Fox notes, “Ecclesiastes is a strange and disquieting book. It gives voice to an experience not usually thought of as religious: the pain and frustration engendered by an unblinking gaze at life’s absurdities and injustices.”[1] Martin Hengel’s seminal work, Judaism and Hellenism, suggests that Koheleth’s work is from a late period (270-220 BCE) when Hellenism’s pessimism began to influence Jewish thinkers. “Hellenistic religion underwent a crisis in the Ptolemaic period, undergoing widespread loss of faith in the traditional gods and their replacement by the impersonal concept of fate. It was an age of considerable skepticism and anxiety about justice, human freedom, and divine care for human beings.”[2] In Hegel’s analysis, the role of the individual emerges, along with the individual’s discouragement about life’s ultimate rewards here and now. What happens after death is a faint hope (perhaps) of an ethereal reward, but what happens here and now is real, substantive and, according to the author, purposeless. In the end, it’s all just passing wind, a moment of relief in a lifetime of toil. According to Hengel, Koheleth voices the cry of the thinker who could “no longer make sense of traditional wisdom and piety, but could not abandon the religion of his ancestors.”[3]

Isn’t that precisely where we find ourselves? Have we not come to the end of the traditional cultural understanding of religion, the Christianized West of our heritage? Have we not found it lacking, both intellectually and spiritually, saturated with bias, politics, empire-building and theological distortion? Have we not reached the place where the world, as explained according to the Church, no longer makes sense? And yet we are not ready to abandon the God of our ancestors, the God of the Hebrews. Everywhere we look, the influence of Christianity as a Western philosophy has created division, destruction and death. Mind you, we recognize that the people who claimed Christ as their savior have been responsible for amazing acts of grace, charity and love. But the history of the Church as a religious organization is quite different. We find it disconcerting that the Church as an organization has abandoned the foundation of God’s revelation in Moses, engaged in synchronistic incorporation of one pagan idea or ritual after another and spread doctrines that are not only incomprehensible but actually dismiss the faithfulness of YHVH by replacing Him with gods of their own making. It’s enough to make us give up on the whole effort.

So Koheleth is our voice. Maybe it comes down to a few days of relief in a lifetime of struggle. Maybe the best we can do is append a few verses to the end of our inquiry exhorting obedience. Or maybe we need such a critical self-examination in order to understand the brokenhearted God of the Bible. Maybe God Himself cannot make sense of the world we have generated. Maybe the world as it is truly is irrational and meaningless.

If that is the final assessment of what we really observe when we take off all the blinders, then perhaps we can appreciate the Greatest Commission: that YHVH is as disturbed as we are about the state of the creation and invites us to actively participate with Him in its restoration. Yes, it is an enormous task. Yes, all around us there is havel havalim. It would be so easy to just give up. But He doesn’t, and we shouldn’t.

Maybe the whole message of Scripture is simply this: Keep going with God.

Topical Index: havel havalim, vanity, Koheleth, Martin Hengel, Ecclesiastes 1:2

[1] Michael Fox, The JPS Bible Commentary: Ecclesiastes, p. ix.

[2] Ibid., p. xxix.

[3] Ibid.