It is only through the corrected reading of hevel as “transience” rather than “vanity” that we may understand the structure of the book of Ecclesiastes, and thereby learn its message. For Ecclesiastes does not offer a single, static teaching from beginning to end, but a thematic progression, one that follows Kohelet’s own discovery of meaning.
The book can be seen as consisting of three parts. The initial stage, covering the first five chapters of the book (starting at 1:12), is characterized by frustration with the transience of life: Kohelet bemoans the fact that all achievements are short-lived. He is bitter about the transience of human contentment (2:1-3), riches (2:4-11), physical existence (3:18-21), and corrective social remedies (chapter 4). Stylistically, this stage is characterized by the juxtapositions of the term hevel with words of despair and tragedy. Though not all references to transience, even at this early stage, are decidedly negative, most are. It is in this first part that we learn why Kohelet “hated life,” for he has discovered that all one’s worldly achievements are, like man himself, in the end but dust and ashes: “For what has a man for all his work, and for his mind’s notions, which he works at under the sun?”
It is this bitter discovery of mortality that propels Kohelet on his quest for meaning.
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Dejection soon gives way to acceptance, however, as the book enters its second stage, starting at 6:4 and running through chapter 7, in which Kohelet begins to view the ephemeral nature of reality more philosophically. Combined phrases such as “transient and grievous” are completely abandoned in this section, less than halfway through the book. The neutrality of the six appearances of hevel in this stage is typified by the example of temporary flattery: “The cheers of the ignorant,” we read, are “like the crackling thorns under a pot; all so temporary, too.” Kohelet loses no sleep over the fickle nature of fools’ praise and fleeting popularity. Having resigned himself to transience, he has come to recognize that it may not be inherently bad after all.
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The third stage covers the last four chapters of the book. By this point, hevel has lost any trace of the negativity which it carried in the early chapters. It is never tied to a second word—never “transience and,” together with something distasteful. On the contrary, in these final chapters, all uses of hevel are associated, directly or indirectly, with joy, or simha.
Ethan Dor-Shav, “Ecclesiastes, Fleeting and Timeless”, Azure No. 18 (Autumn 2004), 76-78.