PROFIT, surplus — what is left over when the reckoning is done; from yatar, 'to remain over.' A commercial word, and it occurs TEN TIMES IN ECCLESIASTES AND NOWHERE ELSE IN THE HEBREW BIBLE. Qohelet frames his whole enquiry as an audit: after all the toil, what is the net? Its opposite number arrives in the same chapter — chesron, the deficit (1:15) — the two halves of a ledger that never balances. It frames Ecclesiastes 3 as well: the 'time for everything' poem is followed straight away by 'what YITRON has the worker?' (3:9), and the answer arrives at 3:19 with a much harder object — the yitron of man over the beast is NOTHING. → first discussed at Ecclesiastes 1:3