Where does “there is nothing new under the sun” come from?

The verse

That which has been is that which shall be, and that which has been done is that which shall be done; and there is no new thing under the sun.

The line closes a short poem at the start of Ecclesiastes (1:3–11). The book’s speaker, Qoheleth, the Preacher, has just asked his opening question: “What does man gain from all his labor in which he labors under the sun?” (1:3). To answer it, he looks out at nature.

The cycles of chapter 1

• Generations. “One generation goes, and another generation comes; but the earth remains forever” (1:4).
• The sun. It rises, it sets, and it “hurries to its place where it rises” (1:5), as if panting to start the same lap again.
• The wind. South, then north, round and round, back to its courses (1:6).
• The rivers. “All the rivers run into the sea, yet the sea is not full” (1:7).
• Eyes and ears. “The eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing” (1:8).

Everything moves and nothing arrives. Only then does he turn to people: what we do has been done, and will be done again. He even answers the objection in advance. Is there anything of which someone can say, “Behold, this is new”? It existed long ago, he replies, “in the ages which were before us” (1:10). It only seems new because “there is no memory of the former” (1:11). His complaint is less that history repeats than that we forget.

“Under the sun”

The phrase “under the sun” appears 29 times in Ecclesiastes and nowhere else in the Bible. It marks the book’s point of view: life seen from ground level, by someone who will not claim to see past what he can see. It was an old expression in the region. The sarcophagus of King Eshmunazar II of Sidon, carved in Phoenician in the Persian period and now in the Louvre, uses the same phrase in its curse on anyone who disturbs the king’s rest. Jerome’s Latin, nihil sub sole novum, nothing new under the sun, became a proverb of its own.

The sun also rises

Verse 5 gave the twentieth century a famous title. In the King James Version (1611) it reads, “The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose.” Ernest Hemingway took the title of his 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises from it, and set Ecclesiastes 1:4–7 as an epigraph, under Gertrude Stein’s remark “You are all a lost generation.” His expatriates drift from Paris cafés to the bullfights of Pamplona, going round in circles, while the earth abides.

Does the rest of the Bible agree?

Not every voice in it. Ecclesiastes itself warns against nostalgia: “Don’t say, ‘Why were the former days better than these?’” (7:10). Other books insist on newness. In Isaiah, God says, “Behold, I will do a new thing” (Isaiah 43:19), and near the end of Revelation the one on the throne says, “Behold, I am making all things new” (Revelation 21:5). The Preacher is describing life as he finds it under the sun, and he calls all of it hevel, breath, as what “vanity of vanities” means explains. Readers have argued ever since whether his circle is despair, honesty, or the beginning of wisdom.