I first read Ecclesiastes as a teenager. It seemed to perfectly capture my existential angst, almost an extension of ‘Catcher in the Rye,’ an expression of my adolescent skepticism. But I’ve returned to it and have found myself enthralled these past few days by layers of wisdom I had completely missed before. I suppose, this is an effect the Bible often has, yet it continues to surprise me.
Hevel as more than meaninglessness, vanity
The word hevel is used thirty eight times in the book of Ecclesiastes. It is translated as meaningless, or vanity, which is an attempt to pass down the metaphor across languages. But the literal meaning is vapor, breath, like the visible breath one has in the cold. I find more meaning in the metaphor of the literal translation than I do in the attempts to recreate the metaphor.
Vapor is something which cannot be grasped. It is fluctuating, never still, never clear. It is also temporary, ephemeral. Comparing life or toil to vapor could be construed as meaningless, but I think that misses the point: it is not that it has no meaning, but that the meaning cannot be grasped. This distinction is the difference between nihilism and a mystic yearning to understand something that the human mind cannot comprehend.
There is another layer to the depth of hevel: Abel. His name is the same meaning, vapor, mist, breath. This connection seems crucial to me in terms of understanding the purpose of the author. Abel’s life was short, taken away, there and then gone.
His life was also the embodiment of a meaning that could not be grasped. His was the first sacrifice that God called ‘good,’ yet he was the first victim of murder, at the hands of his brother. It is the first and ultimate example of the broken link between action and reward, the rift between righteousness and the blessing that should follow.
A nod to McGilchrist
A woefully inadequate summary of McGilchrist’s core thesis: the left hemisphere of the human brain is constantly trying to create a self-consistent model of the world, while the right is open to holding paradox and the ambiguity of metaphor. The left is tortured by that which cannot fit into a model, and will simply deny whatever half makes the other inconsistent. It cannot, for example, accept that a stretch of river is constant, when every drop of water is only in that stretch for a few minutes. Which is to say, it cannot model and therefore hates that which cannot be grasped (the left hemisphere as that which grasps is a key language point of McGilchrist’s). And so those entities are the domain of the right hemisphere, which focuses on context, relationship, and meaning over utility.
It is then impossible for me not to draw the link between the author’s choice of vapor and McGilchrist’s un-model-able entities. Life is hevel, and so it cannot be clearly articulated, or made explicit. But it can still hold deep meaning, which is understood implicitly.
This is a distinction which actually happens at two points: that the author uses a metaphor at all, is the first right hemisphere decision. That the metaphor itself is something which represents metaphor, the ungraspable, is the second such decision.
The burden of eternity
The entire book is the wrestling of the author with an unnamed pain of existence. He is searching for something, and cannot find it, no matter where he looks (pleasure, wealth, wisdom, folly). But in his self-awareness, he also tries to distill then explain the existence of the pain in the first place.
What a heavy burden has laid on mankind! And I have seen the burden God has laid on the human race. He also has set eternity (which can also be translated as ignorance) in the human heart, yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.
The burden is clear: understanding the nature of time, and all that flows from it.
First, there is the knowledge of one’s inevitable death, and specifically one’s limited life. Second, there is the knowledge that time goes on after one’s life is ended. And third, the tension that this places on any human effort: no matter what you do, you cannot build anything eternal. Thus we understand eternity, and strive after it, but can never reach it, and are aware of this permanent gap.
The wheel of time erases anything we’ve ever done, even the memory of us. Any efforts that last past your death and then subject to those who (perhaps undeservedly) inherit it, and so control is passed on and the thing itself is open to remolding, reshaping, a possible mutilation of what you had wanted the thing to be.
This is why all human toil is hevel, vapor, temporary, unable to be grasped.