Nope, It Don’t Mean Vanity: Abel and the Meaning of Hebel in Ecclesiastes
Ecclesiastes 1:2 loudly proclaims that everything is hebel (normally translated “vanity” or “meaningless”), a refrain repeated throughout the book. The first occurrence of this word in the Old Testament comes at the beginning of Genesis, in the Cain and Abel (hebel) narrative. Names often reveal some aspect of a person’s character in the Old Testament, or, like scholar Tremper Longman says, “naming captures the essential nature of a person or thing.”[1] For example, Cain was “gotten” by Eve (Gen 4:1), and Abraham is the “father of a multitude” (Gen 17:5). The same holds true for Abel—the non-metaphorical meaning of his name is “breath” or “vapor,” which is, by its nature, ephemeral and transient.[2] By using hebel as the leitmotif of Ecclesiastes, Qohelet expands the theme of transience and injustice introduced in Genesis 4: everyone and everything in life is subject to the reversal of fortunes that Abel experienced.[3]
However, it seems more is at work in Qohelet’s writing than simply the matter of transience. Rather than referring only to the transience of life, Ecclesiastes uses hebel also as a symbol to discuss how several situations in life mirror the experiences of Abel. Each situation that Qohelet deems hebel in some way relates to the reversal found in Abel’s story.
Qohelet states in Ecclesiastes 1:14 that he has seen all the works done under the sun and that they are all hebel and a pursuit of wind. By making hebel parallel with pursuing wind, Qohelet points to the inability of all people, like Abel, to grasp anything with lasting value. The obedient should experience tangible blessings that add value to one’s life. For Qohelet, however, the one-to-one correspondence between actions and rewards has disappeared, so now the attainment of lasting value through our actions is like attempting to grasp wind. In Ecclesiastes 2:15 Qohelet laments that the wise and foolish are alike in their end—death. No one escapes Abel’s fate, the culmination of the curses that God pronounced after the fall.[4] This also resembles Abel in that the relationship between one’s actions and one’s rewards is incomprehensible. Fool or wise, both are subject to the same fate.
Qohelet states in Ecclesiastes 3:19 that “man has no advantage over the beasts, for all are hebel.” This passage outlines the similarity between humans and animals, namely that they share the same breath and the same fate—death. In this way, Qohelet elaborates on the theme of transience introduced in Genesis 4. As Abel was transient, so is everything else—human and animal alike. Similarly, the “Royal Experiment”[5] of Ecclesiastes 2 finds that everything in life is ephemeral, lacking any lasting value, and that humanity’s only recourse is to enjoy the gifts of God—eating, drinking, a spouse, and pleasurable toil, which are themselves also transient (Eccl 2:24–25).
Qohelet goes on to discuss the fact that the person who has no children in 4:8 resembles the life of Abel: “And for whom am I laboring and depriving myself from the good? This also is hebel and an evil task.” Qohelet works tirelessly to establish wealth and honor, yet he does not receive the blessing of descendants to inherit his wealth. This is a situation that should not exist, for wealth itself represents blessing from Yahweh, a “normal reward for righteous living.”[6] However, Yahweh has withheld from him the further blessing of progeny, even though the person who has obtained the blessing of wealth should also experience the blessing of children. The former without the latter is an “evil” thing.
Finally, Qohelet states in 8:14 that “there is hebel that is done upon the earth: that there are righteous to whom it happens according to the deeds of the wicked, and there are wicked to whom it happens according to the deeds of the righteous. I said that this also is hebel.” This passage is Ecclesiastes’s most explicit reference to the reversal of the expected order of life. As in the Cain and Abel narrative, so in the rest of life—sometimes the disobedient receive blessing while the obedient receive curses.[7] Life often lacks congruency between actions and results, which is perhaps what Qohelet asks his readers to remember when he says “Abel of Abels, everything is Abel.”
If we read hebel in Ecclesiastes as a reference to some aspect of Abel’s life, then the implications for how we understand “the Bible’s strangest book” are enormous.[8] First, reading the book as an examination of the “Abelness” of life—those situations in life when the relationship between actions and their expected results is broken—helps us to see the book not as the rumblings of a discontented sage but rather as the wrestlings of a faithful follower of God. Second, and related, if Ecclesiastes is using hebel as a symbol to refer to Abel’s life—and all that goes wrong in it—then the book also becomes about much more than the “meaninglessness” or “vanity” of life. Rather, it’s a book that guides readers—ancient and modern alike—through the vagaries of life in the post-fall world and offers solutions for how to navigate such a dark and twisted world—faithful obedience to God and enjoyment of his gifts. Taken together, these two implications mean that this ancient book is particularly relevant for not only our current cultural moment but for all times in which humans struggle to figure out what it means to follow God in a world turned upside down.
The following is an excerpt used with permission from Ecclesiastes and the Search for Meaning in an Upside-Down World by Russell L. Meek, which you can order at Amazon or Hendrickson.
Russell L. Meek is associate professor of Old Testament at William Tennent School of Theology. He writes a regular column on understanding and applying the Old Testament at Fathom Magazine, and his most recent books include Ecclesiastes and the Search for Meaning in an Upside-Down World and the co-authored Book-by-Book Guide to Biblical Hebrew Vocabulary. Russ lives with his wife and their three sons in north Idaho, where you’ll find them gardening, cooking, and exploring the wild.
[1] Longman, Ecclesiastes, 177.
[2] K. Seybold, “Hebel,” Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament 3:315. See also HALOT, 236–237.
[3] See Daniel Fredericks, Coping With Transience (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1993), 1–32. Note also Robert Alter (The Wisdom Books: Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes: A Translation with Commentary [New York: Norton, 2010], 346), who prefers the word “breath” because “Hevel, ‘breath’ or ‘vapor,’ is something utter insubstantial and transient, and in this book suggests futility, ephemerality, and also as Fox argues, the absurdity of existence.”
[4] William H. U. Anderson, “The Curse of Work in Qoheleth: An Exposé of Genesis 3:17–19 in Ecclesiastes,” Evangelical Quarterly 70 (1998): 99–113.
[5] Thomas Krüger, Qoheleth (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001), 45
[6] Robert Ellis, “Amos Economics,” Review and Expositor 107 (2010): 463–79. See also Deut 7:11–15.
[7] Longman (Ecclesiastes, 131) makes a similar observation about Eccl 3:22 but argues that Qohelet is uncertain whether there will ever be justice.
[8] Crenshaw, Ecclesiastes, 23.