Although some themes, such as wisdom and folly, death, enjoyment, and inheritance, appear consistently throughout the book, some scholars propose a division between two halves: 1.1–6.9 focuses more on the conditions of the world, and 6.10–12.14 on human abilities and inabilities to comprehend these conditions. But coherence and structure appear unsystematically, in erratic patterns. This random, fleeting sense of unity fits the book's overall perspective on the world as without any underlying or overarching cohesion.

