Hey Bible readers, I'm Tara Lee Cobble and I'm your host for the Bible recap.

Today we started Ecclesiastes, which is part of the wisdom literature in Scripture, and

tomorrow we'll finish it.

It's written by someone called the preacher or the teacher, and that may or may not be

Solomon, but many people believe it points to the life of Solomon, regardless who wrote

it.

This book is ultimately about a grand experiment that the main character sets up.

He has lots of resources at his disposal, and he wants to find out how to live the best,

most joyful kind of life.

Then he unpacks everything he learns so that we don't have to go through this experiment

for ourselves.

He basically buys every single thing on Amazon and writes a concise 12 chapter review

sharing all his data with us.

To let us know what's worth our time and energy and money.

Right out of the gate in verse 2, we get an idea of how he feels about it all.

Vanity of Vanity is all his vanity, he says.

The word he uses for vanity here is Hevel, which means vapor or smoke.

But it also carries the connotation of something that's hard to grasp.

He uses this word 38 times in this book, so it's definitely part of his overarching theme.

Here are some of the things he learns through his observations.

He starts out addressing work.

All hard work is eventually negated by death.

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