Ecclesiastes 1:1-11

Contemporary English Version

Nothing Makes Sense

1 When the son of David was king in Jerusalem, he was known to be very wise,^[a] and he said:

²Nothing makes sense!
Everything is nonsense.
    I have seen it all—
    nothing makes sense!
³What is there to show
for all of our hard work
    here on this earth?
⁴^(A) People come, and people go,
but still the world
    never changes.

⁵The sun comes up,
    the sun goes down;
it hurries right back
    to where it started from.
⁶The wind blows south,
    the wind blows north;
round and round it blows
    over and over again.
⁷All rivers empty into the sea,
    but it never spills over;
one by one the rivers return
    to their source.^[b]

⁸All of life is far more boring
    than words could ever say.
Our eyes and our ears
are never satisfied
    with what we see and hear.
⁹Everything that happens
    has happened before;
nothing is new,
    nothing under the sun.
¹⁰Someone might say,
    “Here is something new!”
But it happened before,
    long before we were born.
¹¹No one who lived in the past
    is remembered anymore,
and everyone yet to be born
    will be forgotten too.

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Footnotes

1.1 known to be very wise: This stands for the Hebrew word often translated “preacher” or “teacher.” The word may refer to someone who was a very wise leader or to someone who had become wise from collecting sayings about wisdom.
1.7 return to their source: Or “flow into the sea.”