Ecclesiastes 1:9-18

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.

¹⁸The wiser I became, the more disappointed I became. The more things I knew about, the sadder I became.