What does person gain by all the toil under the sun?
By Bobby Jamieson, originally published at Plough.
“What does man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun?” (Eccles. 1:3). The question opens Ecclesiastes’ investigation into all of life. Toil is the engine of expected gain. And the negative answer that the protagonist, Qohelet, returns – “no gain” – proves that, since toil is hevel, all is hevel.
By “toil” (Hebrew ‘amal), Qohelet means roughly what we mean by “work,” typically with a negative tint. Elsewhere in the Old Testament the word can mean “distress” or “anguish,” even “misfortune” or “disaster.” In Ecclesiastes, ‘amal typically means “labor” tainted by frustration or futility. But it also names the fruits of labor: not just the money made from selling milk but the whole thriving farm that has taken decades of sleep-stealing work to cultivate.
What does a person gain from all this work, and even from its fruits and profits?
Ecclesiastes is the record of Qohelet’s systematic exploration of potential sources of pleasure and profit. In his experiment embracing all of life, work features prominently.
I made great works. I built houses and planted vineyards for myself. I made myself gardens and parks, and planted in them all kinds of fruit trees. I made myself pools from which to water the forest of growing trees.… I had also great possessions of herds and flocks, more than any who had been before me in Jerusalem. (Eccles. 2:4–7)
Here Qohelet reproduces his résumé. He describes the work of establishing a business and a household, from which and in which he could live in luxury. We should picture an ample, carefully conceived, skillfully developed estate. Qohelet’s accomplishments were built to last. As Old Testament scholar Stuart Weeks comments, “Qohelet’s business is not ephemeral, and he makes his wealth not from, say, buying low and selling high or from providing services, but from vineyards, orchards, timber, and livestock.” In fact, his operation is in some measure self-sustaining: pools, water, orchards, and timber groves; timber furnishes building material. Neither the orchards and irrigation, nor flocks and herds nourished by them, nor grand dwelling at the center were apt suddenly to vanish. All will likely outlast him.
So far, so exceptionally successful. But, after cataloging his enjoyment of other pleasures his wealth could purchase and his leisure permit, Qohelet declares, “Then I considered all that my hands had done and the toil I had expended in doing it, and behold, all was absurd and a striving after wind, and there was nothing to be gained under the sun” (Eccles. 2:11). Qohelet here appraises not just his labor but its outcomes, and not just his wealth but the infrastructure of his fortune, which will generate more fortune. What did his work and his work’s outputs do to deserve this derogatory label of “absurd”? At the very least, their problem is not so much them as him, not that they will disappear but that he will. They’ll last a while yet; he won’t, much longer. The problem with even lasting success is that it can’t last long because its agent and beneficiary won’t. Yet, as far as we can discern, Qohelet denounces his work’s harvest with plenty of breath left in him. This seems to suggest a deeper contradiction.
By calling his life’s work hevel, Qohelet asserts a standing rupture in the chain that joins desire, effort, and outcome. He calls work “absurd” because of the disparity he discerns between what he put in and what he got out. But surely his work had gone as well as he could reasonably have hoped. Whence then the divorce between what he wanted and what he got? Somehow even striking success left him wanting something more.
Shortly after this judgment, Qohelet gives two more reasons why work is absurd:
I hated all my toil in which I toil under the sun, seeing that I must leave it to the man who will come after me, and who knows whether he will be wise or a fool? Yet he will be master of all for which I toiled and used my wisdom under the sun. This also is absurd. So I turned about and gave my heart up to despair over all the toil of my labors under the sun, because sometimes a person who has toiled with wisdom and knowledge and skill must leave everything to be enjoyed by someone who did not toil for it. This also is absurd and a great evil. What has a man from all the toil and striving of heart with which he toils beneath the sun? For all his days are full of sorrow, and his work is a vexation. Even in the night his heart does not rest. This also is absurd. (Eccles. 2:18–23)
By definition, the person to whom Qohelet will leave the legacy of his labor did not work for it. Worse, Qohelet can’t guarantee a fitting successor. The more successful you are, the more you will leave in the hands of a successor of uncertain character and competence. Both toil and wisdom are irrelevant to inheritance. Even if you’re an executive who can select your own replacement, you can’t control what’s done with your enterprise when you’re gone. Time alone will tell you whether you chose wisely – only you won’t be around to hear. Death stops ambition short. What’s beyond your time is beyond your control.
Qohelet’s second reason is that work is full of pains. He piles up those pains like stacks of unread emails and unanswered voice messages: toil, yearning, sadness, anxiety, sleepless nights. He bemoans hardships that are not physical but psychological. Nothing human was foreign to him; long before our age of anxiety, he knew and named the malady.
In another passage on work, Qohelet stirs some proverbial wisdom into his empirical observations.
Then I saw that all toil and all skill in work come from a man’s envy of his neighbor. This also is absurd and a striving after wind. The fool folds his hands and eats his own flesh. Better is a handful of quietness than two hands full of toil and a striving after wind. Again, I saw an absurdity under the sun: one person who has no other, either son or brother, yet there is no end to all his toil, and his eyes are never satisfied with riches, so that he never asks, “For whom am I toiling and depriving myself of pleasure?” This also is absurd and an unhappy business. (Eccles. 4:4–8)
The Hebrew at the start of this passage is difficult. Most translations and commentators take it to say that all effort and achievement arise from envy, but a good case can be made that the verse instead ascribes ambitious work to a passion that draws one person away from another. If you stumble at the “all,” remember that it’s hyperbole. Like a standup comic, Qohelet knowingly keeps qualifications and counterarguments out of the frame, and then squints at the resulting picture to bring one aspect into sharp focus. Whichever translation we opt for, Qohelet’s point is that work is a fertile field for self-destructive desires to take root, go to ground, and spread wide.
Whether fueled by envy or self-isolating obsession, if work is the consuming passion in your life, what could it consume? What will be left after the fire cools?
This article was originally published at Plough and is partially reproduced here without the permission of the author, who is not affiliated with this website or its views.
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