Ecclesiastes 1:5-17

⁵Each morning the sun rises, and each evening it sets, and then it hurries around to where it started from.

⁶The wind blows south, and then it turns around to start blowing towards the north. It goes around and around in circles.

⁷All the streams flow into the sea, but the sea is never full. The water returns to the sky, and when it rains, the water returns to the rivers, and it flows again to the sea.

⁸Everything is boring, with the result that we do not even want to talk about it. We SYN see things, but we always want to see more. We SYN hear things, but we always want to hear more.

⁹Everything continues to be the same as it has always been; things that happen have happened previously, and they will happen again. What has been done before will be done again. There is nothing really new in this world MTY.

¹⁰Sometimes people say, “Look at this! This is something new RHQ!” But it has existed previously; it existed before we were born.

¹¹People do not remember the things that happened long ago, and in the future, people will not remember what we are doing now.

¹²I, the Religious Teacher, have been the king of Israel for many years, ruling in Jerusalem.

¹³By being wise, I concentrated on understanding everything that was being done on the earth MTY. But I found out that God causes all of us to experience things that cause us to be unhappy/miserable.

¹⁴It seems that nothing that happens on the earth really enables us to do anything useful. It is like MET chasing the wind.

¹⁵Many things that are crooked cannot be caused to become straight; we cannot count things that do not exist.

¹⁶I said to myself, “ Hey, I am wiser than any of the kings that ruled in Jerusalem before I became the king. I am wiser and I know more than any of them!”

¹⁷So I determined to learn more about being wise and to learn about knowing about many things, and also to learn about doing things that are very foolish DOU. But I found out that trying to understand those things was also useless, like chasing the wind.