Ecclesiastes opens with the refrain that gives the whole book its character, "vanity of vanities, all is vanity," a Hebrew word, hevel, more precisely meaning vapor or breath, something insubstantial and impossible to grasp, applied across the book to wealth, wisdom, pleasure, labor and even life itself. The Teacher, or Qoheleth, narrates an experiment in living, pursuing wisdom, wealth, great building projects, pleasure and achievement in turn, and finding every one of them ultimately unable to secure lasting meaning or outlast death, which comes equally to the wise and the foolish.
The book's tone stands apart from the confident moral cause and effect of Proverbs, allowing that the righteous sometimes suffer and the wicked sometimes prosper with no clear reason given, and its most famous passage, "for everything there is a season," has become one of the most widely quoted texts in the Bible in secular as well as religious settings for its stark, rhythmic acceptance of life's repeating cycles. Rather than despair, the book's repeated practical conclusion is a kind of measured contentment, to eat, drink and find enjoyment in one's ordinary work as a gift from God, since nothing more than that can be secured or guaranteed, a conclusion the closing verses frame within the more conventional exhortation to "fear God and keep his commandments."