1 — Two different words for time

The verse uses two: zeman (“a season”), a late word borrowed from Persian and rare in the Hebrew Bible, and et (“a time”), the ordinary one, which is about to be repeated twenty-eight times in seven verses. English has to say “time” twice or lose the pairing; this translation says season and then time to keep them distinct.

Chefetz, “purpose,” is worth a glance — it is the same word as delight or desire, so “a time for every chefetz” can be read as every matter or every wish. Later Hebrew moved it toward “thing”, which is why the versions differ.

2–8 — Fourteen pairs, and a word hammered twenty-eight times

The poem is exactly regular, and the regularity is the point: fourteen paired opposites, two pairs per verse across seven verses, with et — “a time” — standing at the head of twenty-eight clauses. The Hebrew is almost mechanical, and this translation keeps every one of the twenty-eight rather than varying the English for style.

Two of the pairs are genuinely obscure. Verse 5’s stones — casting stones away and gathering them — has no agreed referent: clearing a field, ruining an enemy’s field (2 Kings 3:19–25), building work, or, in a rabbinic reading, a euphemism paired with the embracing in the same verse. Nobody knows, and the versions all translate it literally and leave it alone, which is the right instinct.

And verse 6’s abed is not quite “lose” but to destroy or give up as lost — an active counterpart to seeking rather than an accident.

Note what the list is not. It contains no verdicts: killing sits in it as flatly as healing, hating as flatly as loving. The poem asserts that each has its moment and declines to say which moment is which — and verse 11 will say that the pattern is precisely what you cannot make out.

9–10 — The question the poem was built to raise

Yitron, “advantage” or surplus, is an accounting term and one of this book’s keywords — what is left over when the ledger closes. The famous poem, on this reading, is not consolation but setup: if everything has its time and the times simply alternate, what does the worker actually accumulate? The word returns at verse 19 with a much harder object.

Inyan (v10) is “task” or “business,” and it is used only in Ecclesiastes. The verb under it, anah, can mean to be occupied or to be afflicted, and the ambiguity is not resolvable: God has given people something to be busy with, or something to be troubled by.

11 — ⚠ Three readings of one word, and the shelf takes three of them

“He has also put ha-olam in their heart.” The consonants are העלם, and they support at least three readings:

1. Eternity. Olam most often means a remote or unbounded stretch of time. ASV reads “he hath set eternity in their heart” and TNM agrees («la eternidad»); NWT uses its own signature phrase for the word, “time indefinite.” This is the reading behind every devotional use of the verse: a longing for the infinite, planted in us.

2. The world. In later Hebrew olam shifts from unbounded time to the world, and KJV takes it that way — “he hath set the world in their heart” — as does RV («y aun el mundo dió en su corazón»). Ecclesiastes is late enough Hebrew that this is not a stretch.

3. Hiddenness. Repointed, the same consonants give he’elem, from the root alam, to conceal — “he has put obscurity in their heart.” No version on this shelf prints it, and it has the best claim from the sentence itself: the verse continues “yet without man’s ever finding out the work God has done.” Reading 3 makes the two halves of the verse agree. Readings 1 and 2 put a yearning and a frustration side by side and leave the join to the reader.

⚠ No vote is taken. The word is transliterated in the text above precisely because choosing one of the three in English would settle, invisibly, the most interesting question in the chapter.

12–15 — Eat, drink, and a verb about pursuit

The conclusion Ecclesiastes keeps returning to (2:24, 5:18, 8:15, 9:7) arrives here for the first time, and it is worth noticing how modest it is: not that life is good, but that there is nothing better available than to eat, drink and find something good in the work. The book calls it a gift anyway.

Verse 15’s last clause is genuinely hard: ve-ha-Elohim yevakesh et-nirdaf, “and God seeks out ha-nirdaf” — the pursued, the hunted, or possibly “what has been driven away,” i.e. the past. So either God seeks out the persecuted (a moral statement) or God calls back what has already gone by (a statement about the cycles the chapter has been describing). The versions divide and none is obviously right; the translation above keeps the pursued and leaves the ambiguity standing.

16–18 — ⚠ “They are beasts” — and who softens it

Verse 18 says, flatly, that God is showing people she-hem behemah hemah — that they are beasts, they themselves. The final repeated pronoun is emphatic and there is no comparison particle in the Hebrew: it does not say like beasts.

And here the shelf divides in a way that cuts against expectation. KJV keeps it blunt — “that they themselves are beasts” — and so does NWT. It is ASV that softens, inserting a comparison the Hebrew lacks: “they themselves are but as beasts.” So do RV («son semejantes á las bestias») and TNM («son como los animales»). Three of the five supply a softening word; the 1611 translation does not.

Verse 16’s doubling is not a copying slip, incidentally: “in the place of judgement, wickedness there; and in the place of righteousness, wickedness there” — the same word twice, which most versions vary. The point is that both places turn out to contain the same thing.

19–22 — ⚠ The one place where the KJV is the literal one

Verse 19 answers verse 9’s question with the same accounting word: u-motar ha-adam min ha-behemah ayin — the advantage of man over the beast is nothing. And ruach echad la-kol, one breath in all of them: the same word that means spirit, wind and breath, and which the chapter deliberately refuses to distinguish.

Then verse 21, which is the most instructive verse on this page. The Masoretic text points the two participles with the definite article: ha-olah and ha-yoredet, “the one going up” and “the one going down.” The tell is the dagesh in the yod of ha-yoredet — the article doubles the following consonant, and the interrogative he does not. So as vocalised, the verse reads: who knows the breath of man, the one that goes up, and the breath of the beast, the one that goes down? — the ignorance is about the fate, not about the direction.

Repoint the same consonants and you get the interrogative he: who knows — does it go up? does it go down? That reading fits the book’s voice much better, because mi yodea, “who knows,” introduces genuine ignorance elsewhere in Ecclesiastes (2:19, 6:12) — and it makes the verse a refusal to distinguish human from animal death, which is exactly what verses 19–20 have just argued.

⚠ And here is the reversal worth carrying away. KJV follows the vowels exactly: “Who knoweth the spirit of man that goeth upward…” Every other version on the shelf adopts the repointing and supplies a word the pointed text does not have — ASV “whether it goeth upward,” NWT “whether it is ascending,” TNM «¿quién sabe si el espíritu…», with RV hedging into the subjunctive («suba arriba»). This library spends most of its time noting where the KJV smooths something over. Here it is the one version that did not, and the modern consensus is the conjecture. The text above follows the pointing and prints the alternative in full.

Verse 22 ends where the book always ends: nothing better than to take pleasure in the work, because nobody gets to see afterwards. Not a resolution — a stopping place.