Ecclesiastes—the הבל conclusion and a full translation of the book

John Cook (my co-author on this blog), Phillip Samuel Marshall (Houston Baptist University), and I have finished our Ecclesiastes grammatical commentary for the Baylor series. I believe we began planning this volume way back in 2010, though there were significant interruptions for tenure as well as other projects (not to mention teaching!). But we do not take the Baylor series lightly—we do not see it a simple parsing guide (for which one would probably be better off using a computer application), but as a serious grammatical commentary. And it is very satisfying to have it finished—Ecclesiastes is not a simple book in terms of BH grammar.

A couple posts ago (here), I had asked for input on translation הֶבֶל. The responses were excellent, so much so that in the end we decided to leave the Hebrew in our translation. A literal gloss “vapour” doesn’t work too well, but translating the metaphor often requires culturally-conditional glosses that are anachronistic for the book itself. Because ours is a grammatical commentary with the goal of explaining the grammatical nuances to students of Hebrew (whether intermediate or advanced and seasoned), in the end we decided we did not need to make this choice for our readers. We present some of the options in the commentary and then leave the word as הֶבֶל throughout.

For those interested, I’ve pasted our full English translation below the fold.

Ecclesiastes’ use of הֶבֶל?

In our Baylor commentary (BHHB series), J. Cook, P.S. Marshall, and I currently follow Michael Fox’s (A Time to Tear Down & A Time to Build Up, 1999) rendering of הֶבֶל as “absurd”. Below I have excerpted the comment on הבל in Eccl 1:2 as it currently stands:

The denotation of the noun הבל ‘breath, vapor’. As used in Ecclesiastes, it must be a metaphor, since it makes little sense for Qohelet to assert that ‘everything’ is literally ‘vapor’. What the metaphor means, though, has long been and remains the subject of some debate. The following are those English glosses most commonly proposed: “ephemeral,” “worthless, trivial,” “empty, nothing,” “incomprehensible,” “deceit,” and “senseless, nonsense” (see Meek 2016 for an exhaustive survey). Some suggest that the word is used in more than one way in the book (see, e.g., Crenshaw 1987: 57; Miller 2002 offers a variation on this). Others disagree: Fox, for example, argues that the term must have a single dominant meaning around which the book’s argument coheres (1999: 35); he proposes that Ecclesiastes’ use of הבל parallels Camus’ idea of “absurd,” that is the “disjunction between two phenomena that are thought to be linked by a bond of harmony or causality, or that should be so linked … Absurdity arises from a contradiction of two undeniable realities” (1999: 31).

(By the way, Meek’s survey of the approaches to הבל is quite good: Russell L. Meek. 2016. Twentieth and Twenty-first-century Readings of Hebel הֶבֶל in Ecclesiastes. Currents in Biblical Research 14(3): 279-97.)

And yet I have some reservations about “absurd”. First, it feels anachronistic, though perhaps that’s simply because Fox builds on Camus rather than any other ancient source. Second, absurd is always abstract and sometimes a more concrete meaning for הֶבֶל seems to fit just fine. The question is, what less abstract meaning?, and then, is it really ok to render the word with multiple English glosses? I, too, would like to find a single gloss that fits and so signals the book’s coherence, since I agree with Fox that the author of Eccl has used the word for the argument’s leitmotif.

So, for the one or two readers out there — here’s a question: does “haze” work? It keeps a connection to the apparent etymology “vapour, breath” but connects to a metaphorical use in English (“it was hazy to me”). Does “it’s a complete haze” capture the dissonance between creation’s order and the human inability to fully discern it for the benefit of prosperous and righteous living that is at the heart of Ecclesiastes?

If so, tell me why.

If not, tell me why.