What Does Ecclesiastes 1:10 Mean?
Is there anything of which it is said, See, this is new? It has already been in the ages before us.
Key words are shown with the Hebrew or Greek and what each word meant.
Selah Decoded Version The Selah Decoded Version renders what the Hebrew and Greek words meant to the people who first heard them.
King James wording
King James Version
Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us.THE KEY
The Hebrew word for “new” also belongs to the word for the returning month: newness can be renewal, not only a first.
THE MEANING
The verse presses against the feeling that what stands before you has no predecessor: what can be called new has appeared across the ages before you. It leaves room for real renewal while showing how often freshness is a return you did not recognize.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that being new makes something without precedent, or that the present begins from nowhere.
THE ROOT
חָדָשׁ
chadash
GROWS FROM
חדש
To be new or fresh; to renew.
חָדָשׁ (chadash, new) shares its root with חֹדֶשׁ (chodesh, month), whose beginning follows the returning new moon, and חִדֵּשׁ (chiddesh, renew). Newness here can carry the sense of return: what has appeared before can still become fresh again.
ALSO GROWS
month: Month; also associated with the new moon.
חֹדֶשׁ
The month begins with a recurring lunar cycle, linking newness with return.
renew: To make new or renew.
חִדֵּשׁ
This verbal form makes explicit that newness can be a renewing of what already exists.
דָּבָר
davar
GROWS FROM
דבר
To speak; a word or utterance.
“anything” in this verse is davar. The verse asks whether there is a דָּבָר (davar), a “thing” that can be said to be new; Hebrew uses the same noun for a thing and a word. The question reaches beyond events to the naming of them: novelty is also something we say about what we encounter.
ALSO GROWS
davar: A word, matter, affair, or thing.
דָּבָר
The same word translated “thing” can mean “word,” holding the event and its telling together.
speak: Spoke or speak.
דִּבֵּר
This verb from the same root makes the verse’s phrase “whereof it may be said” echo the word for “thing.”
THE PATTERN
What appears new within the present often returns in renewed form across repeating cycles.
You send out your breath, and they are created; you renew the face of the ground.They are new every morning; great is your steadiness.Therefore we do not give out; though our outer person is worn through, yet our inner person is made new day after day.THE THREAD
You send out your breath, and they are created; you renew the face of the ground.The psalm uses the same חדש (chadash, renew) root as “new” here, but as a verb for renewing the earth’s face. What has come before can still be renewed, so recurrence does not mean nothing is being made fresh.
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