Case for Catholics

Studies & Meditations

Under the Sun — A Study of Ecclesiastes 2

Ecclesiastes 2 walked in order — down through vanity and despair, then up through the turn at 2:24 to the purpose of man: to know and love God. The whole book hinges on four words: everything is measured under the sun, until St Paul answers in the same vocabulary — in the Lord.

Open in the graph →

The chapter itself: Ecclesiastes 2

The shape of this study. Ecclesiastes 2 is a journey, and it has to be walked in order. Solomon takes us down — every good thing under the sun, tried and weighed and found to be breath — until there is nothing left to hope in. Only from the bottom does the answer mean anything. So: vanity → despair → the frame → the turn → the Pharisees → the point → the joy. The despair is not the message. It is the excavation that makes room for the message.

It all hinges on four words. Qoheleth fences every verdict with “under the sun“ — and inside that frame he is right. St Paul answers him in the same vocabulary with a different frame: “your labour is not in vain in the Lord.” Same labour, same death — opposite verdict.

Verse numbers: the Library’s Bible is the Douay-Rheims (Vulgate numbering). Most modern Bibles follow the Hebrew numbering. Where they differ, the modern (RSV-CE) number is in parentheses.

I. The descent — Vanity

Hebel / Habel (Heb): Literally denotes a “breath” or “vapor” (Proverbs 21:6; Isaiah 57:13). As such it is often used in the Bible to signify:

Roughly half of its occurrences in the OT are found in Ecclesiastes, which has as its theme the exclamation: “All is vanity” — Ecclesiastes 1:2, 1:14; 2:17; 12:8.

Among the experiences of life, the things that are pronounced vain are:

Vain thing Reference
worldly pleasure Ecclesiastes 2:1
wealth Ecclesiastes 5:9 (RSV-CE 5:10)
wisdom Ecclesiastes 2:15
the vigour of youth Ecclesiastes 11:10
the inevitability of death Ecclesiastes 3:19; 11:8

Various nuances have been proposed for the meaning of vanity in Ecclesiastes, ranging from “brevity” to “futility” to “absurdity”. Interestingly, the numerical value of the Hebrew term hebel is 37 (ה 5 + ב 2 + ל 30), which is precisely the number of times the word appears in the book.

II. The bottom — despair

This is the low point of the whole Bible, and it is meant to be. Solomon is not a man who missed out. He got everything — houses, vineyards, gardens, pools, servants, herds, silver and gold, singers, every delight his eyes asked for (Eccl 2:4–10). He withheld nothing from himself. And then he turned and looked at all of it:

“And therefore I was weary of my life, when I saw that all things under the sun are evil, and all vanity and vexation of spirit.” — Ecclesiastes 2:17

Wisdom does not save him from it either — the wise man and the fool die the same death and are forgotten alike (2:15–16). Whatever he built goes to someone after him, and he cannot know whether that man will be wise or a fool (2:18–19).

St Gregory of Nyssa puts the image on it — pleasure is letters traced in water:

Like writing in water, the enjoyment disappear in their doing. When the activity stops, the pleasure stops, and nothing is laid up for the future, nor is any trace of happiness left behind. There is no advantage for those who labor for what is vain. — Homilies on Ecclesiastes 4, on Eccl 2:11 · read it

Sit here for a moment before moving on. If the book stopped at verse 23, there would be no answer at all. That is the point of the descent: everything a person could possibly build a life on has just been weighed, by the one man best placed to test it, and every one of them came back breath.

And notice what is doing the work. Every vanity in this chapter reduces to one fact: you die, and someone else gets it. The pleasure fails because it stops (2:11). The wisdom fails because the wise man dies like the fool (2:16). The building fails because it passes to an heir who may be a fool (2:19). Death is the engine of the whole despair. Hold onto that — it tells you exactly what shape the answer will have to take.

III. “Under the sun”

Before going up, notice the fence Qoheleth builds around every single verdict. Thirty times in twelve chapters he says it: ὑπὸ τὸν ἥλιον — under the sun.

“and behold all was vanity and vexation of spirit, and there is no advantage under the sun.” — καὶ οὐκ ἔστιν περισσεία ὑπὸ τὸν ἥλιον — Ecclesiastes 2:11

This changes everything about how the book should be read. Qoheleth is not saying life is meaningless. He is saying that within this frame, nothing accumulates — and inside that frame he is completely, rigorously right. Chapter 2 is not the complaint of a bitter man. It is an accurate report from inside a closed system, filed by the one person with the resources to test every wall of it.

So the answer to Ecclesiastes can never be a better argument. You cannot out-reason him; his logic is sound. The only thing that answers Ecclesiastes is a broken ceiling — something that comes from outside “under the sun.”

Which is precisely what happens in the very next verse.

IV. The turn

The very next verse is where the light gets in — and it is easy to miss, because it sounds so ordinary:

“Is it not better to eat and drink, and to show his soul good things of his labours? And this is from the hand of God.” — Ecclesiastes 2:24

From the hand of God. Nothing in the list changed. The bread is the same bread. What changed is where it is received from. The vanity was never in the things — it was in holding them as though they were their own end.

And this is the first vertical line in a relentlessly horizontal chapter. Everything until now has been measured under the sun, side to side, and come back empty. Here, for the first time, something is said to come down — from the hand of God. The ceiling has not opened yet. But it has cracked. Gregory of Nyssa closes his commentary on the chapter exactly there:

“This comparison between good and evil enables us to flee despicable things and direct our lives to what is better in Christ Jesus our Lord, to whom be glory forever and ever. Amen.” — Homilies on Ecclesiastes 5, closing (read it)

And St John Chrysostom gives the rule that turns a vain thing into an eternal one:

Riches are vain when they produce luxury, but they cease to be vain when they go forth to the needy. — Homilies on Ephesians 12 · read it

That homily is the direct answer to the obvious objection: if the world is God’s work, how can it be vanity? Chrysostom — the heaven is not vain, the earth is not vain; what is vain is what we make, “because they have no useful end.” Give it an end, and it stops being breath.

Worth seeing why he reached for Ecclesiastes at all: that homily is expounding Ephesians 4:17 — “walk not as also the Gentiles walk ἐν ματαιότητι τοῦ νοὸς αὐτῶν, in the vanity of their mind” (Eph 4:17). Paul used the Septuagint’s Ecclesiastes word, so Chrysostom went straight to Ecclesiastes to explain it. The New Testament was already speaking Qoheleth’s vocabulary — which is the thread section VII picks up.

But… is there a time for vanity?

Gregory takes exactly that question up in the next chapter — see Homily 6 (“a time to be born and a time to die”), Homily 7 and Homily 8 on Ecclesiastes 3:1–13.

V. The case study — the Pharisees

I would go so far as to say this is part of what Jesus was angry at the Pharisees for. Vanity. And they should have known better.

Section IV said the vanity was never in the things — it was in holding them as though they were their own end. The Pharisees are that error performed with religion itself. And the link is not just thematic: it is in the vocabulary. The Septuagint’s word for hebel all through Ecclesiastes is ματαιότης —

ματαιότης ματαιοτήτων … τὰ πάντα ματαιότης — Ecclesiastes 1:2 (LXX)

— and the word Jesus uses of their worship, quoting Isaiah 29:13, is from the same root:

μάτην δὲ σέβονταί με — “And in vain do they worship me, teaching doctrines and commandments of men.” — Matthew 15:9

He is not calling their religion wrong. He is calling it vapor.

The accounting

Three times in one chapter, of the hypocrites’ almsgiving, prayer and fasting:

“Amen I say to you, they have received their reward.” — ἀπέχουσιν τὸν μισθὸν αὐτῶν — Matthew 6:2, 6:5, 6:16

ἀπέχω is a commercial word: paid in full, receipted, nothing outstanding. Now put it beside Qoheleth’s verdict on everything he built:

οὐκ ἔστιν περισσεία ὑπὸ τὸν ἥλιον — “and there is no advantage under the sun.” — Ecclesiastes 2:11 (LXX)

The same bookkeeping. The Pharisee’s account settles at the instant of the act and yields no surplus. It is Nyssa’s writing-in-water in ledger form — the praise is spent in the doing, and nothing carries.

Appearance without substance

Hebel is vapor: the look of a thing with no body to it. That is the charge, almost word for word:

  • “All their works they do for to be seen of men” — πρὸς τὸ θεαθῆναι τοῖς ἀνθρώποις, to be gazed at, the root of theatre. Piety as spectacle. — Matthew 23:5
  • “For they say, and do not.” — Matthew 23:3
  • “You are like to whited sepulchres, which outwardly appear to men beautiful but within are full of dead men’s bones.” — ἔξωθεν μὲν φαίνονται ὡραῖοι — Matthew 23:27

And the barb underneath it: four verses later he charges them with building the sepulchres of the prophets (23:29). They decorate tombs. They are tombs.

The mechanism

Why is this vapor rather than merely hypocrisy? Because of where the glory is drawn from:

“How can you believe, who receive glory one from another: and the glory which is from God alone, you do not seek?” — δόξαν παρὰ ἀλλήλων λαμβάνοντες — John 5:44

A closed circuit of human praise. It pays out completely and leaves nothing, because it never touches the only source that is not vapor. In that sentence vanity and unbelief are the same failure — which is exactly why this section stands where it does, one step before the answer.

Why they, of all people

Two reasons, and together they are the whole force of “they should have known better.”

It was in their own canon. Ecclesiastes has a passage on religious vanity specifically — Qoheleth walking into the temple:

“Keep your foot, when you go into the house of God, and draw near to hear. For much better is obedience, than the victims of fools, who know not what evil they do.” … “Let your words be few.” — Ecclesiastes 4:17–5:1 (RSV-CE 5:1–2)

They sat “on the chair of Moses” (Mt 23:2). They possessed the scroll that told them the sacrifice of fools is worthless noise.

And the tradition explains why it caught them. St John Cassian devotes a whole book to the spirit of vainglory, and his central point is the dangerous one:

“That vainglory is the more dangerous through being mixed up with virtues.” … “In this very way of virtue along which we are walking… we may be elated by our successes, and so sink down.” … “How vainglory, when it has been overcome, rises again keener than ever for the fight.” — Cassian, Institutes XI

He then names Hezekiah and Uzziah — men “approved by the witness of Holy Scripture,” each “overthrown by a single dart of vainglory.”

Vainglory does not prey on the dissolute. It feeds on real religious achievement. The Pharisees were not frauds — they genuinely did tithe the mint and anise (Mt 23:23). That is precisely what exposed them. It is the one vice you can only contract by succeeding — which is why it drew the sharpest anger in the Gospels.

A note for accuracy: Jesus never quotes Ecclesiastes at them — the link is lexical (through the LXX) and thematic, not a citation. Matthew 6:7 (“much speaking”) reads like a direct hit on Eccl 5:1 but targets the heathens, not the Pharisees. And vanity is not the whole indictment.

Which sets up the question the next section answers. If even the law kept perfectly can curdle into vapor the moment it is done to be seen — then what is left that is not vanity?

VI. The point

So if all things on earth are vanity, if our life is so fleeting, then what is the point..

The Catechism answers that with the most beautiful sentence I have ever read..

“He calls man to seek him, to know him, to love him with all his strength.” — CCC 1, from the section titled “The life of man — to know and love God”

The purpose of man is to know and love God.

That is the answer to hebel. Not that the breath isn’t a breath — it is — but that man was not made for the breath:

“The desire for God is written in the human heart, because man is created by God and for God; and God never ceases to draw man to himself. Only in God will he find the truth and happiness he never stops searching for.” — CCC 27

Which is why Solomon could not find it. He was searching in the right way for the right thing in the wrong place — and the restlessness he felt in chapter 2 is the same one Augustine named:

“Thou hast made us for Thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless till it rest in Thee.” — Augustine, Confessions I, 1 (quoted at CCC 30)

The despair of Ecclesiastes 2 is the restlessness of a heart that has not yet rested in God. It is not a dead end. It is a homing signal.

What that looks like in practice

Your service should not be done for yourself but for those around you — agape. Sacrifice. Sacrifice is not vanity but justice. Life is fleeting and all in an instant. Whatever you lay up for yourself here on earth is gone when you are gone. There is not real true value in it. So why do we focus so much on this life? This was pointed out in the Ignatius Study Bible — that the point of Ecclesiastes was to instill a contempt for the world, and I think that’s true. We should hold a contempt for this world, because it is all vanity. Gone in an instant. But if we sacrifice for each other… now that is justice, and eternal. As Jesus said, laying up for ourselves treasures in heaven — for where your treasure is, there also is your heart.

“Lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven… For where your treasure is, there is your heart also.” — Matthew 6:20–21

This is Chrysostom’s rule again, and it is the whole resolution of the chapter: the way to stop laying up breath is to lay it up in someone else. Sacrifice is the one expenditure that does not evaporate, because it is made toward the only thing that lasts.

VII. The joy — “in the Lord”

We did not go down into the despair to stay there. We went down so that the promise would land with its full weight. And the promise comes back in Qoheleth’s own words.

Why it was vanity at all

Ecclesiastes never says why the world is like this. St Paul does — and he says it using the exact Septuagint word:

τῇ γὰρ ματαιότητι ἡ κτίσις ὑπετάγη, οὐχ ἑκοῦσα … ἐφ’ ἑλπίδι “For the creature was made subject to vanity: not willingly, but by reason of him that made it subject, in hope.” — Romans 8:20

ματαιότης — the word of Ecclesiastes 1:2. So the vanity is not the design; it is the wound. And Paul does not end the sentence in diagnosis — he ends it in hope, with creation itself “delivered from the servitude of corruption, into the liberty of the glory of the children of God” (Rom 8:21).

Paul concedes the case first

He does not argue Qoheleth down. He grants him everything:

“If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable.” — 1 Corinthians 15:19

That is chapter 2’s verdict, accepted in full. If the frame is all there is, the despair is correct. Paul even stakes Christianity itself on the vanity word — “if Christ be not risen again, ματαία [vain] is your faith” (1 Cor 15:17).

And then the flip

Everything turns on which frame you are standing in. Set the two sentences side by side:

Ecclesiastes 2:11 1 Corinthians 15:58
οὐκ ἔστιν περισσεία — there is no surplus περισσεύοντες ἐν τῷ ἔργῳ τοῦ κυρίου — abounding in the work of the Lord
ὑπὸ τὸν ἥλιον — under the sun ἐν κυρίῳ — in the Lord
τὰ πάντα ματαιότης — all is vanity ὁ κόπος ὑμῶν οὐκ ἔστιν κενός — your labour is not vain

“Therefore, my beloved brethren, be steadfast and unmoveable: always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that your labour is not in vain in the Lord.” — 1 Corinthians 15:58

Change the frame from “under the sun” to “in the Lord,” and the verdict inverts. Same labour, same world, same death — and now there is a surplus, because the ceiling is broken and the One who broke it is risen. This is the answer to section III: not a better argument, a broken ceiling.

And it answers the despair at exactly the point where it hurt. Section II found that death was the engine of every vanity — the wise man dies like the fool, the work goes to an heir. 1 Corinthians 15 is the resurrection chapter. The one thing that made everything vanity is the one thing Christ undid.

A note for accuracy: Romans 8:20 is a genuine allusion — ματαιότης is the Ecclesiastes word. The 1 Cor 15:58 parallel is a resonance and an exact logical inversion, not a proven quotation; περισσεύω and κενός are ordinary Greek. It is strong enough said that way, and does not need overclaiming. Same discipline as section V.

The joy was in the book the whole time

And notice — this is not imported. Qoheleth himself says it seven times, a drumbeat under all the vanity:

2:24 · 3:12–13 · 3:22 · 5:17 · 8:15 · 9:7

“For every man that eats and drinks, and sees good of his labour, this is the gift of God.” — Ecclesiastes 3:13

“Go then, and eat your bread with joy, and drink your wine with gladness: because your works please God.” — Ecclesiastes 9:7

The book that says all is vanity also commands enjoyment, over and over, as a gift received from above. Both are true at once, and only the vertical frame lets them be.

What it opens onto

“This perfect life with the Most Holy Trinity — this communion of life and love with the Trinity, with the Virgin Mary, the angels and all the blessed — is called ‘heaven.’ Heaven is the ultimate end and fulfillment of the deepest human longings, the state of supreme, definitive happiness.” — CCC 1024

Read that against hebel and it is almost a taunt. Vanity is vapor; heaven is definitive. Vanity is what passes in an instant; heaven is the fulfillment of the deepest longing — the very longing that all of chapter 2 was failing to satisfy. Solomon’s ache was never a design flaw. It was the shape of a promise he could not yet see filled.

“Blessed are the clean of heart: they shall see God.” — Matthew 5:8

And the book’s own last word puts the ledger where it belongs — there is an accounting, it simply was never going to settle under the sun:

“Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is all man.” … “And all things that are done, God will bring into judgment.” — Ecclesiastes 12:13–14

Everything under the sun is breath. But nothing done in the Lord is.

That is not a bleak book. Walked all the way through, Ecclesiastes is one of the most hopeful books in Scripture — it clears the ground of every false hope so that the true one has somewhere to stand.

Where to go next

Sources

Ecclesiastes 1–12; Gregory of Nyssa, Homilies on Ecclesiastes 4–5 (tr. McCambly); John Chrysostom, Homily 12 on Ephesians; John Cassian, Institutes XI; Augustine, Confessions I,1; Matthew 6, 15, 23; John 5:44; Romans 8:20–21; 1 Corinthians 15; Catechism of the Catholic Church §§1, 27–30, 1024.

How this was written

The author’s own study, developed and delivered at his Bible study. An AI assistant helped structure it and build connective tissue from the sources; every quotation is checked by the author.