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Articles, Bible studies, and sermons that contain Ecclesiastes 1:2:
Ecclesiastes 1:2-3
Excerpted from: Ecclesiastes and the Feast of Tabernacles (Part 1)The very first statement covers the entirety of the treatise and made possible the application given it by the Jews.
Vanity is a word that you are familiar with in another form. It appears very early in the Bible in the name that was given to the second person born on earth—Abel. That was his name. Vanity, she called him. It signifies, in its simplest form, a breath. It is nothing. That is what it means—nothing.
A breath has a very short term of life, does it not? You take one. You breath in, you breath out, and then you take another one. It only lasts for just a second. When we begin to carry out the application of this word, temporariness begins to come to the fore because a breath of a person is very temporary and very quickly replaced by another, and another, and another breath. So it signifies something that is nothing, impermanent, temporary. But that hardly exhausts its meaning.
This phrase "vanity of vanities" is written in superlative form. It us very similar in its application as "Holy of Holies." That is the superlative form in the Hebrew. Another one you are familiar with is the Song of Songs, sometimes called Canticles, sometimes called Song of Solomon. But the Hebrew name is Song of Songs. It is a superlative form.
Vanity of vanities—modern translators tend to translate this word "meaningless." A single breath has no meaning to it. Some have gone so far as to translate it "absurd." In a way, I think that this fits the context of the book the best (the word absurd), because the word absurd in English means "irrational." It is an affront to reason; something that does not fit the order and purpose that we seek from life. That is what Solomon was getting at.
He said, "Life is absurd. Why do we live? All of our life we live here working, doing things, and at the end of it what does a person have to show for what he has done? It is absurd, it is irrational, it is meaningless."
When Solomon said there is no profit in verse 3, he means that there is nothing in this world that makes life worth living. How depressing!
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