The Preacher, son of David and king in Jerusalem, opens with a declaration that does not soften. He says, Vanity of vanities, all is vanity. The word is not a complaint but a verdict. He does not explain it away or offer comfort. He states it as a fact that the rest of the chapter will press into the reader.
He asks what profit a man has from all his labor under the sun. The question is not rhetorical in the sense of a teacher expecting an answer. It is a genuine inquiry that the Preacher will pursue through the whole book. But here, at the start, he gives the answer before the evidence is laid out. There is no profit. The labor does not accumulate to anything lasting.
The Preacher looks at the earth itself. One generation goes, another comes, but the earth remains forever. The sun rises and sets and hurries back to where it rises. The wind goes south, turns north, and keeps turning on its circuits. The rivers run into the sea, but the sea is never full. The water returns to the rivers and runs again. Everything is stuck in a loop that does not change and does not satisfy.
All things are full of weariness. A man cannot utter it. The eye is not satisfied with seeing. The ear is not filled with hearing. The senses keep taking in, but nothing completes them. The world offers endless repetition, and the human appetite is never filled by it.
What has been is what will be. What has been done is what will be done. There is nothing new under the sun. If someone says, See, this is new, the Preacher insists it has already been in the ages before us. There is no remembrance of former generations, and there will be no remembrance of those who come later. The cycle of forgetting is as fixed as the cycle of the sun.
The Preacher then identifies himself. He was king over Israel in Jerusalem. He applied his heart to seek and search out by wisdom everything done under heaven. He calls it a sore travail that God has given to the sons of men to be exercised with. The search itself is part of the burden.
He has seen all the works done under the sun. His verdict is the same: all is vanity and a striving after wind. What is crooked cannot be made straight. What is lacking cannot be counted. The world has limits that wisdom cannot fix and cannot fill.
He communed with his own heart. He had great wisdom, more than all who were before him in Jerusalem. His heart had great experience of wisdom and knowledge. But when he applied his heart to know wisdom and to know madness and folly, he perceived that this also was a striving after wind. The pursuit of wisdom itself does not break the cycle.
In much wisdom is much grief. He who increases knowledge increases sorrow. The Preacher does not say wisdom is evil. He says it brings pain. The more a man sees, the more he understands that the crooked stays crooked and the unsatisfied eye stays unsatisfied. The chapter ends with that hard truth, not with a resolution.