It’s all hebel. Qoheleth’s world is, indeed, quite bleak. There are some who suffer with no one to comfort them, and also some who toil all alone for seemingly no purpose. The fool who consumes his own flesh. And so on. It isn’t pretty. And Qoheleth’s declaration that it’s hebel? Well, again… it’s not pretty.
Expectations. That, ultimately, is what gives hebel its force. Wickedness in the places of justice and righteousness? Hebel. That your dreams can, or especially will, come true? Hebel. One would expect to find justice in the place of justice. When they search every corner and still cannot find it? It is hebel. All is hebel (1:2; 12:8).
It sounds like an existential lament, doesn’t it? All is hebel. That sounds like something Eeyore might say. But this one word functions as a double-edged sword. Yes, there is an element of lament or disappointment. And there is also a universal indictment. Things simply are not operating the way they should, whatever that should may look like.
Everything under the sun is plagued by hebel. By labeling it such, in my view, Qoheleth forces the reader to consider: where is God? Why is God not stepping in? All is hebel. That is the consequence of divine hiddenness. A sustained dissent, but no picket signs or gavels anywhere in sight. Simply the bold issuance of a universal value judgment on the entirety of God’s creation.
God is Out of Office
Everyone rejoices when their supervisor goes OOO. For many, it is a sigh of relief. I can work without having extra tasks dumped on me at the last minute. Nobody is looking over my shoulder. I might get to leave a few minutes early. It can be amazing, truly.
But suppose your boss never returns from being OOO, despite retaining the title. Suddenly, it’s not so peaceful. Everyone is working overtime. The boss’ responsibilities have shifted to senior, disgruntled employees. Kinda like The Office, after Steve Carell left. It never recovered.
That’s how the world operates for Qoheleth. “The high official is watched by a higher”—but the highest one rules from a lengthy vacation far, far away. By the time Qoheleth is teaching, the Highest One is absent: absent from the oppressed and the isolated toiler, absent in judgment—at least during this lifetime (3:16–22)—yet still capable of becoming angry at a poorly formed utterance (5:6).
It’s all hebel. In such a world, there is a break in the deed-consequence relationship—which, as I mentioned before, is the belief that good deeds yield reward and evil deeds yield punishment. In the hebel world, as I argue in the thesis, “righteousness fails to yield reward and justice does not prevail.”
What Hebel Feels Like
To draw on Marcus A. Gigliotti’s seminal paper “Qoheleth: Portrait of an Artist in Pain,” hebel signifies a life that is both enigmatic and unsatisfactory. Hebel is not evil. It is not some dangerous, supernatural threat. But again, it is not desirable. Let’s look a little further at the possible meaning of hebel, without trying to force a single translation of it.
For one scholar, Choon Leong Seow, hebel is rooted in “vapor” or “breath,” which, of course, is used throughout the Hebrew Bible to denote that which is like vapor, ephemeral, fleeting, illusory, etc. But then there’s Ecclesiastes. Here, Qoheleth radically expands the biblical metaphor.
Qoheleth applies the term in various ways, concerning various things. Ultimately, he labels something hebel if it is fundamentally and cognitively ungraspable. It is quite like the English expression “it doesn’t make sense,” or where I’m from, “it don’t make no sense.” The expression does not identify one specific frustration, but it conveys the experience of deep frustration.
It is incomprehensible, that which is hebel, and that is part of the natural order for Qoheleth. And why are such things incomprehensible? I can’t help but feel it might have something to do with the deity who withholds understanding to promote fear (3:11, 14).
And this is where my disdain for literal translations of hebel in Ecclesiastes becomes furious. Such translations blunt the profound frustration Qoheleth exhibits throughout the book, and, I can say this in a blog, is a huge literary disservice. Whether Qoheleth is a pessimist or optimist is not the question here. It is whether hebel is pessimistic.
When you were in high school algebra, did you have a moment where, trying to solve an equation, you became frustrated and wanted to rip pages out of your textbook? What do you mean X is -2 OR +2?! That’s hebel. You feel that it is in vain, it is absurd, it frustrates you, it might even be a meaningless or futile task. You do not say “this is wind” or “this too shall pass.” Perhaps you say, “this absolutely sucks.”
The Fallout of Divine Absence
There is, indeed, a level of pessimism, or at least frustration in hebel. But, all is not ultimately meaningless. Qoheleth does not reconcile the expected moral order with the chaos he observes.
But he does not completely reject life or ultimate reality; if he did, he might associate himself a bit more with the self-consuming fool (4:5). But he does actively object to life under the sun, where comforting theologies prove false or misleading, and a hidden God allows suffering to flourish.
God may or may not be responsible for the violence and chaos on earth. For Luca Mazzinghi, Qoheleth holds God directly responsible for it. While I wouldn’t go that far, I find it quite hard to avoid the idea that all this chaos ensues because God is OOO. If the expected Divine Comforter cannot be found, then hebel identifies the fallout.
The God who created it all and once spoke to our ancestors is not stepping in. Human evil is rampant and seems to face few consequences. There is no voice from the sky threatening to flood the earth. The rivers are not turning to blood. The seas are not being parted for the oppressed. There is no fire and brimstone raining down upon the places of justice and righteousness, perverted by wickedness.
Because it, too, is hebel.
The hebel world is a world where suffering continues unabated because divine action and purpose remain inscrutable. God has hidden it all. And God has hidden God.
There may be justice in the afterlife. But who knows? That is the question of 3:16–21. Who knows? And the implied answer is, no one. Will we go to the afterlife? Will the sufferer be rewarded and the abuser punished? None can tell. And so, “there is nothing better than that all should enjoy their work” (3:22).
There is a tension between reality and, as I mentioned at the beginning, expectation. A mismatch, even. We expect justice. We are foolish for expecting it to be administered. It is not found where we expect it. And there isn’t necessarily a good reason to trust theological or eschatological timelines. It’s far better to just enjoy the moment while you can.
Hebel as Literary Protest
In each example, throughout the entirety of Ecclesiastes, Qoheleth takes the reader on a mental journey. When he reports looking to the place of justice, our initial thought is “that’s where justice should be.” But instead? He reports finding wickedness. We are then debating with ourselves, “wait a minute, something isn’t quite right with this picture…”
We are presented with a conventional view, and then it is immediately shattered. Talk about a cultivation of ambiguity. But that is how it works. And the conclusion is… it’s all hebel.
It’s all hebel because something is fundamentally broken, but we cannot understand what or why. For Stuart Weeks, these limits on human knowledge are attributable to divine purpose. Thus, the limits on knowledge are divinely ordained.
We cannot understand God. We cannot understand divine works. It is like chasing after the wind. We simply cannot understand a God who is playing an infinite game of cosmic hide-and-seek. And while that may sound faithful or cheerful in some contexts, what about in the context of injustice?
There are people actively hurting at the hands of the powerful. But we are told to not be amazed. We are told that no one comforts them. That leads Qoheleth to commend death and nonexistence. That is not comforting or cheerful. It is bleak. It is undesirable.
That is when the protest “becomes an insistence on the validity of human experience in the face of a God who offers neither clarity nor discernible benevolence.” God is hiding. God is OOO and has been for quite some time. Maybe at first there was a sigh of relief… but by Qoheleth’s time, the office was consumed by chaos.