Ecclesiastes קֹהֶלֶת

Kohelet — Ecclesiastes — is the Bible's book of honest questions. 'Vanity of vanities, says Koheleth; all is vanity': the king who had everything — wisdom, houses, gardens, gold, song — reports back from the far side of every experiment the human heart can run, and finds hevel, breath, vapor: a striving after wind. Nothing new under the sun; one event to the wise man and the fool; time and chance happen to them all. And yet, woven through the dark honesty, the book keeps arriving at the same shore: to eat your bread with joy, to drink your wine with a merry heart, to see life with the one you love, to do with your might what your hand finds to do — for this is the portion and the gift of God. The sages nearly hid the book away until its end reconciled it: 'The end of the matter, all having been heard: fear God, and keep His commandments; for this is the whole man' — the verse the synagogue repeats aloud after the final verse, so that Kohelet closes not in vapor but in awe. It is read on Sukkot, the festival of our joy — the season when Israel sits in a booth of branches, holding fragile walls and full joy in the same hands, which is the whole argument of the book in a single mitzvah.

This edition presents each verse word by word: the Hebrew, its transliteration, its root, its gematria, and a form-true English gloss, beneath a complete modern English translation adapted from the public-domain Jewish Publication Society version of 1917. Five classical commentators accompany the text — Rashi, Ibn Ezra, the Alshich (Devarim Tovim), Metzudat David, and Metzudat Zion — so that the questions, and the faith that holds them, can be studied on a single page. May the One who gives and gathers the breath of all the living teach us to number our days under the sun.