Hevel, hevel, all is hevel

 This week the Come Follow Me curriculum covered Proverbs and Ecclesiastes. In the Tanakh, Jewish scholars put the wisdom writings, including Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, at the end of their scripture.  That is presumably because they don't think they are as doctrinially or historically significant as other books. I tend to agree. I struggled a little to know what to talk about in this week's post.  I decided to investigate the main thematic word in the book of Ecclesiastes. 

Ecclesiastes begins "The words of the Preacher, the son of David, king of Jerusalem. Vanity of Vanities, saith the preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity." (Ecc 1: 1-2)  I was curious about the word "vanity." In modern English the word has come to mean something like "conceit" particularly about one's appearance. That is not the meaning the translators were using back in King James' time.  in JKV it means "emptiness" or "lack of substance."  The Hebrew word is הבל, pronounced "hevel" or "havel" (depending on the tense) and my Hebrew Bible app gives the definition of "breath or vapor."  I wondered about that because there is another word, רוח ruach, that means breath or wind.  I wondered if there were any instances in the Bible where hevel means vapor, like real atmospheric water vapor. My app allows me to look at all the instances of a word in context, and as I did, and it seems it is always used in just the same way as in Ecclesiastes, to represent moral emptiness. So then, I asked myself, why would the dictionary writer think it means vapor or breath?  

The only hint I got was from Isaiah 57:13 

When thou criest, let thy companies deliver thee; 
but the wind shall carry them all away
vanity shall take them;
but he who putteth his trust in me shall possess the land
and shall inherit my holy mountain.

in this passage the word, wind, is רוח. and then the word, vanity, is הבל. Basically all of Isaiah is poetic, and in Hebrew poetry they use rhyming ideas rather than rhyming words. Scholars would call it parallelism. The ruach here is clearly seen as parallel to the hevel. It is the only place I found where hevel is associated with breath or wind.  

That being said, the idea of hevel as a kind of mist or vapor is an effective image.  Imagine someone who sees a cloud of smoke, and it seems solid, but when he reaches for it just dissipates.  The author of Ecclesiastes sees all of life's joys and trials as just that ephemeral. I must say, now that I am older, I relate with Ecclesiastes more than I did when I was 20.  Things are seeming more impermanent than they used to. The main difference between me and "the Preacher" is that he has no hope or faith in an afterlife. I am beginning to believe that one of the greatest gifts that Jesus gave to the world was a belief that, not only does life continue after this life, but that it is potentially better.