What does “vanity of vanities” mean?

The words in Hebrew

Ecclesiastes opens with its motto, and closes with it too (Ecclesiastes 12:8).

“Vanity of vanities,” says the Preacher; “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.”

The Hebrew is havel havalim. Doubling a noun is how Hebrew makes a superlative: the Song of Songs is the greatest song, the holy of holies the holiest place, the king of kings the greatest king. So havel havalim is the breathiest breath, vapor through and through. Then, for good measure: hakol hevel, all of it is breath.

Hevel is the breath you see on a cold morning, mist that burns off, steam over a pot. It is real, but you cannot grab it or keep it. The word runs through the book nearly forty times, about half of all its uses in the Hebrew Bible. A psalm uses it the same way: “Man is like a breath. His days are like a shadow that passes away” (Psalm 144:4). It is also the name of the Bible’s first man to die, Abel, Hevel in Hebrew, whose story is in why Cain killed Abel.

How breath became vanity

The Greek translators rendered hevel as mataiotēs, emptiness or futility. Jerome’s Latin Bible, around AD 400, made the motto vanitas vanitatum et omnia vanitas. In Latin and in older English, vanity meant emptiness, from vanus, empty, which also gives us “in vain.” The sense of vanity as pride in your appearance came later, and it has misled readers ever since. Modern translators have tried futility, emptiness, meaninglessness, smoke, mist and breath. Each catches part of the picture.

The Preacher’s voice

The speaker calls himself Qoheleth, “the Preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem” (1:1). The title comes from a Hebrew root for gathering an assembly; its Greek equivalent, Ekklesiastes, from ekklesia, assembly, gave the book its name. Tradition hears Solomon. Most scholars date the book centuries later, partly because it borrows Persian words such as pardes, park. A narrator introduces him, and then he speaks in his own voice, a rich king running experiments on his own life.

Then I looked at all the works that my hands had worked, and at the labor that I had labored to do; and behold, all was vanity and a chasing after wind, and there was no profit under the sun.

Houses, vineyards, parks, pools, servants, silver and gold, singers: he tried them all (2:4–10), and all of it was breath. His favorite partner for hevel is “a chasing after wind.”

Not quite “meaningless”

Yet the same book tells its readers to enjoy what they have: to eat, to drink and to be joyful (8:15), and to live joyfully with the one you love “all the days of your life of vanity” (9:9). That is the key. Because life is breath, brief and beyond our control, hold it lightly and take it as a gift. The final word, in the narrator’s voice, is “Fear God and keep his commandments” (12:13).

In paintings and novels

The Latin motto named a whole kind of painting. Seventeenth-century Dutch artists made still lifes called vanitas: skulls, guttering candles, hourglasses and soap bubbles, reminders that everything passes. John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) set a town called Vanity on the pilgrim’s road, with a fair that runs all year, Vanity Fair. William Makepeace Thackeray borrowed the name for his 1848 novel.