< Ecclesiastes 1 >
1 [I am Solomon], the son of [King] David. [I rule] in Jerusalem [and people call me] ‘The (Preacher/Religious Teacher)’.
2 I say that everything is mysterious; everything is hard for me to understand; it is difficult to understand why everything happens.
3 (What do people gain from all the work that they do here on the earth?/It seems that people gain no lasting benefit from all the work that they do here on the earth.) [RHQ]
4 [Each year] old people die and babies are born, but the earth never changes.
5 [Each morning] the sun rises, and [each evening] it sets, and [then] it hurries around to where it started from.
6 The wind blows south, and then it [turns around to start blowing towards] the north. It goes around and around in circles.
7 All the streams flow into the sea, but the sea is never full. The water returns [to the sky], and [when it rains], the water returns to the rivers, and it flows again to the sea.
8 Everything is boring, [with the result that] we do not even want to talk about it. We [SYN] see things, but we always want to see more. We [SYN] hear things, but we always want to hear more.
9 [Everything continues to be the same as it has always been]; things that happen have happened previously, and they will happen again. What has been done before will be done again. There is nothing [really] new in this world [MTY].
10 Sometimes people say, “Look at this! This is something new [RHQ]!” But it has existed previously; it existed before we were born.
11 [People] do not remember the things [that happened] long ago, and in the future, people will not remember what we are doing now.
12 I, the Religious Teacher, have been the king of Israel [for many years, ruling] in Jerusalem.
13 By being wise, I concentrated on understanding everything that was being done on the earth [MTY]. [But I found out that] God causes [all of] us to experience things that cause us to be unhappy/miserable.
14 It seems that nothing that happens on the earth really enables us to do anything useful. It is [like] [MET] chasing the wind.
15 [Many] things that are crooked cannot be caused to become straight; we cannot count things that do not exist.
16 I said to myself, “[Hey], I am wiser than any of the kings that ruled in Jerusalem before I [became the king]. I am wiser and I know more than any of them!”
17 [So] I determined to learn [more] about being wise and to learn about knowing about many things, and [also] to learn about [doing things that are] very foolish [DOU]. [But] I found out that trying to understand those things was also [useless, like] chasing the wind.
18 The wiser I became, the more disappointed I became. The more things I knew about, the sadder I became.
