A search for meaning in a fleeting life.
Explore the book of Ecclesiastes - a search for meaning in a fleeting life, and a closing call to fear God and keep his commandments.
The full text, World English Bible - start reading here.
ReadA refrain about the fleeting nature of achievement.
Learn MorePleasure, wealth, and work tested and found wanting.
Learn MoreA famous poem on the seasons of life.
Learn MoreEcclesiastes opens with one of the Bible's most quoted lines, "vanity of vanities, all is vanity," spoken by a narrator identified as "the Teacher" (Hebrew: Qoheleth) and traditionally associated with Solomon. The book takes a strikingly candid, almost skeptical tone compared to much of the rest of the Old Testament, repeatedly observing that human effort, wisdom, and achievement all eventually fade, and that death comes to the wise and foolish alike.
The Teacher describes a series of personal experiments in pursuit of lasting satisfaction, pleasure, massive building projects, accumulated wealth, and even the pursuit of wisdom itself, and finds each ultimately unable to provide permanent meaning. This unusually blunt honesty about life's apparent futility has made Ecclesiastes a touchstone for later philosophical and existential reflection, distinct in tone from the confident, ordered advice found in Proverbs.
Chapter 3 contains the book's best-known poem, listing paired opposites - "a time to be born, and a time to die... a time to weep, and a time to laugh" - to describe the rhythm of human experience. Ecclesiastes ultimately closes not in despair but with a practical conclusion: to enjoy the ordinary gifts of daily life and, in its final verses, to "fear God and keep his commandments," treating that posture as the only stable center in an otherwise unpredictable world.