Week 35 Ecclesiastes
The Preacher drops bible-readers into deep water with his first words: everything is meaningless…utterly meaningless (another version says: vanity of vanities! All is vanity).
It’s a comment with two parts. There’s the quantity part: All. And there’s the topic part: Vanity. On the surface it sounds simple enough but I realize it’s only simple enough if I know exactly what vanity means. And if I know what-all All includes.
Figuring that out would be a complicated exercise and since I have to finish the book tomorrow I don’t have the time. But I’m going to at least record a couple of ideas about where I’m at with this idea about All being Vanity.
First – I don’t think that All means absolutely everything that exists. For example later in the book the Preacher talks about the Lord. I don’t think All includes the Lord. I figure All could mean all the things I can observe in the material world and whatever-all I think about them.
Second – I don’t think that Vanity means totally and completely without meaning weight or value. From other things the Preacher says my guess is that Vanity is a relative idea. Things in the material world and my thought-world are extremely lightweight. They have just about the lightest meaning-weight-value that it’s possible to have and still have any weight at all. Almost nothing without being nothing.
So my paraphrase is: virtually everything is nearly-meaninglessly lightweight.
Note: quote from Ecclesiastes 1:2 (NLT & NASB)