Ecclesiastes 12:8

Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher,.... The wise man, or preacher, set out in the beginning of the book with this doctrine, or proposition, which he undertook to prove; and now having proved it

Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher; all is vanity. A summary of the first part. Vanity of vanities. Resumption of the sentiment with which the book began (Ecclesiastes 1:2; 1 John 2:17). Verse 9.

This sentence, wherewith he began this book, he here repeateth in the end of it partly as that which he had proved in all the foregoing discourse, and partly as that which naturally and necessarily followed from both the branches of the assertion now laid down, .

Ecclesiastes 12:8 Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher; all [is] vanity.Ver. 8. Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher.] Who chose for his text this argument of the vanity of human things, which having fully proved and improved, he here resumes and concludes. See previous verses.

Verse 8. This affecting and minute description of old age and death is concluded by the author with the same exclamation by which he began this book: O vanity of vanities, saith Koheleth, all is vanity. Now that man, the masterpiece of God's creation, the delegated sovereign of this lower world, is turned to dust, what is there stable or worthy of contemplation besides? ALL - ALL is VANITY!

8. Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher; all is vanity] The recurrence at the close of the book, and after words which, taken as we have taken them, suggest a nobler view of life, of the same sad burden with which it opened, has a strange melancholy ring in it. To those who see in the preceding verse nothing more than the materialist’s thoughts of death as echoed by Epicurean poets, it seems a confirmation of what they have read into it, or inferred from it. The Debater seems to them, looking on life from the closing scene of death, to fall back into a hopeless pessimism. It may be rightly answered however that the view that all that belongs to the earthly life is “vanity of vanities” is one not only compatible with the recognition of the higher life, with all its infinite possibilities, which opens before man at death, but is the natural outcome of that recognition as at the hour of death, or during the process of decay which precedes and anticipates death. The “things that are seen and are temporal” are dwarfed, as into an infinite littleness, in the presence of those which are “not seen and are eternal” (2 Corinthians 4:18). And there would be, we may add, even a singular impressiveness in the utterance of the same judgment, at the close of the great argument, and from the higher standpoint of faith which the Debater had at last reached, as that with which he had started in his despondent scepticism. It is, in this light, not without significance that these very words form the opening sentence of the De Imitatione Christi of à Kempis. There remain, however, two previous questions to be discussed. (1) Are the words before us the conclusion of the main body of the treatise, or the beginning of what we may call its epilogue? and (2) is that epilogue the work of the author of the book or an addition by some later hand? The paragraph printing of the Authorised Version points in the case of (1) to the latter of the two conclusions, and it may be noted as confirming this view that the words occur in their full form at the beginning of the whole book, and might therefore reasonably be expected at the beginning of that which is, as it were, its summing-up and completion. In regard to the second question, the contents of the epilogue tend, it is believed, to the conclusion that they occupy a position analogous to that of the close of St John’s Gospel (John 21:24) and are, as it were, of the nature of a commendatory attestation. It would scarcely be natural for a writer to end with words of self-praise like those of Ecc 12:9-10. The directly didactic form of the Teacher addressing his reader as “my Son” after the fashion of the Book of Proverbs (Ecclesiastes 1:8, Ecclesiastes 2:1, Ecclesiastes 3:1; Ecclesiastes 3:11; Ecclesiastes 3:21) has no parallel in the rest of the book.

This passage is properly regarded as the Epilogue of the whole book; a kind of apology for the obscurity of many of its sayings. The passage serves therefore to make the book more intelligible and more acceptable.

8. Vanity of vanities — This solemn finale employs the key-note with which this inquiry began. It is as if the proposition then announced had now been demonstrated.