Kevin Carson wrote a piece in response to my recent posts on Ecclesiastes, offering further explanation of the meaning of “vanity.” Carson believes the Preacher uses the term not so much to refer to the “unsatisfying, endless repetition of old things…” (as I defined in my second post), but to refer to the frustratingly enigmatic nature of life in a fallen world. That is, that though we try to understand why life happens the way it does, we simply can never know.

Carson is on to something here, and he does a great job exploring the argument of the entire book (while I was limiting myself in my post only to the explanation of vanity in chapter 1). Carson proposes his definition in stark contrast to mine, though I’m inclined to see us as exploring the topic from different angles. I focused on the day-to-day experience of vanity, while Carson gets at the ideological underpinnings of the concept.

His insights are well communicated and worth considering. Check it out!