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

Today we started Ecclesiasties, 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 of 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 two we get an idea of how he feels about it all.

Vanity of vanity is all is vanity, he says.

The word he uses for vanity here is heavily, 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 learned through his observations.

He starts out addressing work. All hard work is eventually negated by death. You and I see this all

the time. Buildings decay, technology is outdated, and even our income is diminished by taxes.

It's just a reminder of the futility of work.

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