While I thoroughly enjoyed preparing for all of my lectures - as well as listening to the amazing education that Pastor Brian and Tracy delivered - the book that stuck a chord with me the most was Ecclesiastes because of its frank description of the meaninglessness of life.
I'll dig a little deeper into the actual content of Ecclesiastes on another day. Today's thought is about the Headline Word of Ecclesiastes (1:2), and how the various versions have translated it.
- "Meaningless! Meaningless!" says the Teacher. "Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless!" New International Version NIV
- "Vanity of vanities." KJV, ESV and NASB, though the former footnotes it "futility of futilities."
- "Nothing makes sense. Everything is nonsense." Contemporary English Version CEV
- "Useless! Useless! Completely useless!" New Century Version NCV.
- "Smoke, nothing but smoke." The Message MSG
Part of the fun thing about not knowing Hebrew or Greek is being able to try to figure out why a word was chosen for the different English versions, and what shade of meaning is meant by each.
The most popular offering by far is Vanity of vanities, which I think is a milquetoast word. I understand vanity here means hollow and without value and worthless, but for 21st century readers, it is a pretty mild rebuke for the ultimate condemnation The Teacher has for a striving after X,Y and Z. It probably had more pop for 17th century readers, who were more familiar with the second commandment being 'Don't take the name of the Lord your God in vain.' For many of us, the implication is that Solomon is looking at his mirror, and just sees arrogance everywhere. One argument I've heard for it being "the right word" is that when you compare Vanity of vanities to Holy of holies, it makes a pretty nice boxed set.
"Nonsense" is word my mom used on us when we were full of it. "The plum juice just happened to spill all over your freshly-waxed floor." "Nonsense," she'd say. Or "Stop that nonsense!" A bunch of silliness.
"Useless," too, has the shade of meaning of being the salt that loses its saltiness; it is a thing that used to have importance, but it has lost it. It is useless now, but it wasn't always thus. I don't know if that's the direction The Teacher was trying to lead us.
By far the most interesting of the bunch is The Message, which is not unusual. (It seems a little bizarre, doesn't it, to live in an age, when I could drive 45 minutes from here and ask the guy who wrote this version, "Why did you pick that word?" and probably get a response.) The Message is pretty famous for picking some vibrant word choices. I like the image of the things that are important in this world as being nothing but smoke, especially since we have done a pretty successful job at demonizing smokers! Match that up with "Where there's smoke, there's fire" and you could come up with a pretty decent Ash Wednesday sermon: wealth, hard work and wisdom are the source of the flame that turns to smoke. And what are you left with? Ashes.
But the word I like best (and again, your favorite word depends largely on your world view) is meaningless, if for no other reason than its a word that's completely out of character with the rest of Scripture. I love it that this word - and this book - is in our holy Writ. Sure, the rest of the Bible takes sin to task for being meaningless, but wisdom? Hard work? Solomon spent 10 chapters of Proverbs extolling the wonder of wisdom, and had a whole sub-class of Proverbs asking us to look at ants, of all things, to teach us how to live. So how do we hold those two books in the same hand?
Stay tuned.
Our Savior Lutheran Church
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