Joy at the End of the Tether: The Inscrutable Wisdom of Ecclesiastes

by Douglas Wilson

Sincere and thoughtful Christians need to resist two errors of interpretation as they seek to understand this small book of wisdom. The first is that of treating the word vanity as modern existentialists would treat it, meaning absolute meaninglessness. Of course, from beginning to end, including Ecclesiastes in the middle, the Bible rejects this error. And further, if Solomon were arguing the absolute meaninglessness of absolutely everything, then why should we trust his argument? It too is under the sun. How could anything, or any word, mean utter meaninglessness? Whenever anyone announces that there is no such thing as truth, a listener should always wonder if the speaker believes his expression to be true. Solomon is a wiser man than to fall into the idiocy of modern existential relativism. So vanity in this book does not mean final and ultimate absurdity; something else is in view, which we will consider in its place.