Studying Tanakh benefits from establishing a general, overall impression before reviewing exegetes.

contradictions may serve a heuristic purpose, setting those who struggle through them the task of negotiating complex values and personalities without reducing them to simple binaries.

All things that a created being makes do not last. All created beings will grow weary [if they try] to create substance which is the basis of [all things], or if they try to destroy substance and make it disappear.

Our lives are unfinished and unfinishable. We do too much, never enough and we are done before we’ve even started.

In this last stage, “we find exuberant affirmations of life, and the joy and wisdom that it can bring. Kohelet has now learned, and seeks to teach, the deeper lesson of hevel: Transience as inspiration.”

20 It is not that “nothing satisfies” – it is precisely because of hevel that everything has the potential to satisfy.

Hevel appears seventy-three times in Tanakh; thirty-eight of those instances are in Ecclesiastes, making it the work’s repeated, summative, and unavoidable drumbeat of a mantra.

Once you make peace with just being a lump of meat on a rock, you can stop stressing and appreciate the rock itself.

“Economies thrive when individuals strive, but because individuals will only strive for their own happiness, it is essential that they mistakenly believe that producing and consuming are routes to personal well-being.”