Ecclesiastes opens with the Preacher’s verdict on life “under the sun”: vanity of vanities, all is vanity, a wearisome cycle where generations come and go, the sun rises and sets, rivers run to a sea that never fills, and there is nothing new under the sun. Ancient civilizations that saw history as an endless, cyclical repetition of birth and death found in it only chaos and hopelessness, with no future to hope in, the same despair a modern novelist echoed when he titled a novel after this very chapter. The message traces the frustrations that flow from that vantage point: the vanity of toil that outlives the one who toiled, and the certainty that everything under the sun will fade away.
Scripture traces those frustrations to a single cause: the Fall. Creation itself was subjected to futility because of Adam’s sin, and so it groans, waiting to be set free from its slavery to corruption into the freedom that belongs to the glory of God’s children. That is what makes the biblical worldview different from the pagan cycle: history is not an endless loop but a line running toward an ending God has promised, one where he remembers his people, makes all things new, and gives an eternity that outlasts every vanity under the sun.