“Merest breath, said Qohelet, merest breath. All is mere breath.
What gain is there for man in all his toil that he toils under the sun.”[1]
There are some books in the Bible that at first glance make me scratch my head. Qohelet (Ecclesiastes) is one such book. It is so brutally honest in its questions. It is striking in its biting discourse on life.
I had no idea that the name of the book was a bit shrouded in uncertainty. The translators of the Septuagint chose the title “Ecclesiastes” because it means “the one who assembles”.[2] Qohelet is addressing the assembled, which in Greek is ekklesia, thus “Ecclesiastes”.[3] But Robert Alter claims in his commentary that we really do not know if it is a title or proper name. As a result, he chose to title the book in his translation the Hebrew word “Qohelet”.[4] I am fond of using the Hebrew names as they were first written down. It feels grounding and honoring of the culture.
Qohelet is holding in tension the meaning of life. What is the point in all this striving? It is “mere breath”. We seek after joy, and yet experience madness on the way. We run toward wisdom, and yet folly is at every turn. This tension is shown in an ancient African proverb as well, “to stumble is not to fall, but to move forward faster.”[5] There need not be any meaning. Job’s friends might have served him far better and been more help in his pain if they had just sat with him and said, “All is mere breath”.
This state of coming to terms with the seeming madness and pointlessness of life need not be permanent, but it is a necessary counter to the constant striving for meaning. The search for meaning seems just as capable of driving us mad. Rest can be found in just sitting in the tension of it all.
[1] Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary, 1st edition (New York ; London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2018), 679.
[2] Ibid., 673.
[3] Elaine A. Phillips, An Introduction to Reading Biblical Wisdom Texts (Peabody, Massachusetts: Hendrickson Publishers, Inc., 2017), 123.
[4] Alter, The Hebrew Bible, 673.
[5] Crystal Downing and Rodney S. Sadler Jr, The Africana Bible: Reading Israel’s Scriptures from Africa and the African Diaspora (Minneapolis, Minn: Fortress Press, 2009), 262.
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