What the book is
Ecclesiastes is the book of the Bible that asks the hardest questions most bluntly. Its speaker, called the Teacher, tries everything a person can try to find something that lasts: wisdom, pleasure, great works, wealth. He watches the sun rise and set, the wind go round, the rivers run to a sea that is never full, and he sees the same fate meet the wise and the foolish, people and animals alike. His verdict opens and closes the book:
Breath upon breath, says the Teacher, breath upon breath! Everything is a breath.
Yet the Teacher keeps coming back to joy: to eat and drink and find satisfaction in work as God’s gift, to enjoy life with the one you love, to remember your Creator while you are young. And he knows that God “has also put a sense of eternity in their hearts” (3:11), even if people cannot see the whole of what God is doing.
Who wrote it, and when
The Teacher is introduced as “David’s son, king in Jerusalem” (1:1), and his search in chapter 2 sounds like Solomon’s, so Jewish and Christian tradition long held that Solomon wrote it. Most scholars today think it was written much later, in the Persian or early Greek period, between the fifth and third centuries BC, because its Hebrew is late and contains Persian loanwords, and because the Solomon of chapter 2 reads like a role the writer takes on. The book also has a frame: the first verses and the last (12:9–14) speak about the Teacher in the third person, as if a disciple had gathered his words. The draft takes no side on these questions; they do not change how a sentence is translated.
How the book is laid out
Ecclesiastes is loosely ordered, and readers divide it in different ways.
- Everything is a breath (1:1–11): the endless circling of the world.
- The Teacher’s search (1:12–2:26): wisdom, pleasure, great works and wealth, and the gift of eating, drinking and enjoying one’s work.
- A time for everything (3): “a time to give birth, a time to die”.
- What the Teacher sees under the sun (4–10): oppression, rivalry, riches, the limits of wisdom, and sayings on how to live in an uncertain world.
- Youth and old age (11:1–12:7): cast your bread on the waters, enjoy your youth, and remember your Creator “before the silver cord is snapped”.
- The epilogue (12:8–14): “Fear God and keep his commandments.”
How Open Word Bible translates Ecclesiastes
Breath (1:2). The book’s key word, used about 38 times, is the Hebrew word for a breath or vapor: something real but brief, that cannot be grasped. Older Bibles say “vanity” (“vanity of vanities”), newer ones “meaningless”. The draft keeps the picture, “Breath upon breath ... Everything is a breath”, so that the reader can see what the Teacher sees, and the footnote gives the other renderings: vanity, meaningless, futility, absurd, vapor and smoke. The Readable level says what passes like a breath: “Nothing lasts!”
The Teacher. The Hebrew name, Qoheleth, means one who gathers or addresses an assembly. The Literal level keeps it as a name; Balanced and Readable say “the Teacher”.
The tensions are the book’s. The Teacher says things that seem to pull against each other: that wisdom is better than folly, and that the wise die like fools; that pleasure is a breath, and that there is nothing better than to enjoy one’s food and work. A decision notes that the draft does not smooth these out; they belong to the book.
Eternity in their hearts (3:11). The word translated “eternity” may mean a sense of time beyond the present, or something hidden from people. The draft marks the decision uncertain and footnotes the readings.
The poem of old age (12:1–7). The keepers of the house tremble, the grinders stop, the almond tree blossoms, the silver cord snaps and the golden bowl breaks. These lines have been read as pictures of the ageing body, of a great house falling silent, or of a storm. The draft translates the pictures as they stand, and each is marked uncertain and footnoted.
The whole of being human (12:13). “Fear God and keep his commandments, because this is the whole of being human.” The Hebrew says only “this is the whole of humankind”; the footnote gives “the whole duty of everyone”, the reading of older Bibles.