May 09
Vanity of vanities
I can’t specifically say when I first heard a reading from Eccelsiastes, but I do remember it sounding strikingly miserable for the Bible. I guess I might have been around nine or ten. I was not really aware of either the obsolescent meaning of vanity as emptiness, nor of the odd semitic construction of the superlative that passed into English via the KJV. What I do know is that I associated the phrase with Private Frazer from Dad’s Army. In my mind “Vanity of vanities: all is vanity!” segued effortlessly into “We’re all doomed, Captain Mainwaring, doomed I tell you.” Irrespective of the fine details of exegesis, that tone seems to match the rhetorical tradition of quoting Qoheleth, and shows how one’s own reading is a multi-layered and many-influenced thing. Some phrases just don’t seem the same in newer translations, and discovering the Bible’s very own miserable bugger made the wording all the more valued.
May 13th, 2008 at 4:54 pm
Personally, the entire book is dismal whereas Wisdom stands as a much more ‘biblical’ book. No matter the translation, Ecclesiastes is the stuff that boredom and fatalism is made of. It is by far my least favorite book to draw from.
May 13th, 2008 at 4:55 pm
[...] Good point Here [...]