The word behind "vanity of vanities" means breath

"Vanity of vanities, all is vanity" is one of the Bible's most quoted lines, and "vanity" is nobody's fault exactly: it arrived through Jerome's Latin vanitas and settled in via the King James Version. But the Hebrew word, hevel, is not an abstraction. It is a physical thing: vapor, mist, the puff of breath that hangs in cold air for a moment and is gone. Isaiah uses it for what a gust of wind carries off; Proverbs calls dishonest wealth a vapor driven away. Ecclesiastes opens by stacking it five times in a single verse, hevel havalim, breath of breaths, the most fleeting of the fleeting.

Swap that picture in and the whole book changes. "All is vanity" sounds like a verdict: life is worthless. "All is vapor" is a description: life is real, and beautiful, and cannot be held on to. Wealth, wisdom, work, youth, the book examines each and finds not that they are nothing but that they will not hold still, which is why its other refrain is "chasing after wind." Translators are still arguing; modern versions try "meaningless," "futile," and "mere breath," and the argument itself is the evidence that no single English word carries the metaphor.

The word has one more echo. Hevel is also a name. In Hebrew, the brother Cain kills in Genesis 4 is not called Abel but Hevel, breath, the first human in the Bible to die, gone like the thing he was named for. Whether Ecclesiastes intends the allusion is debated, but ancient readers could not have missed it: Ecclesiastes' key word is also the name of the Bible's first death.