Ecclesiastes 12:8

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 Christiof 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 Ecclesiastes 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. The tone of Ecclesiastes 12:11 is rather that of one who takes a survey of the book as one of the many forms of wisdom, each of which had its place in the education of mankind, than of the thinker who speaks of what he himself has contributed to that store. On the whole, then, there seems sufficient reason for resting in the conclusion adopted by many commentators that the book itself ended with Ecclesiastes 12:7 and that we have in what follows, an epilogue addressed to the reader; justifying its admission into the Canon of Scripture and pointing out to him what, in the midst of apparent perplexities and inconsistencies, was the true moral of its preaching. The circumstances which were connected with that admission (see Introduction, chs. ii., iii., iv.) may well have made such a justification appear desirable.