What Does Ecclesiastes 2:22 Mean?
For what is there for the person in all his toil, and in the herding of his heart, in which he toils under the sun?
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
For what hath man of all his labour, and of the vexation of his heart, wherein he hath laboured under the sun?THE KEY
Hebrew repeats the same root for the toil a person bears and the act of toiling, asking what effort yields when it circles back as its own burden.
THE MEANING
Your work can occupy your hands and thoughts while the question of its lasting yield remains open. The verse holds the strain between what you labor for and what that labor gives back beneath the sun.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that enough effort necessarily produces lasting gain or settles the heart.
THE ROOT
עֲמָלוֹ
ʿămālô
GROWS FROM
עמל
ʿ-m-l
Toil or labor under strain, with a sense of trouble or hardship.
English shifts from the noun “labour” to the verb “laboured,” but Hebrew repeats עמל (ʿ-m-l), tying the toil a person bears to the act of toiling. The verse’s question turns on that loop: what does labor yield when labor itself becomes the burden?
ALSO GROWS
ʿāmāl: Toil, labor, trouble
עָמָל
This noun names the work as wearisome toil, not just an amount of effort.
ʿāmēl: Toiling, laboring
עָמֵל
The closing verb repeats the root as an ongoing activity, binding what the person bears to what the person keeps doing.
THE PATTERN
Human effort and anxious striving cannot guarantee the lasting gain they seek.
What remains to a man from all the toil that he toils under the sun?It is emptiness for you to rise up early and sit up late, to eat the bread of pains; for so he gives his beloved sleep.Which of you, by being pulled apart, can add one forearm to his span?THE THREAD
What remains to a man from all the toil that he toils under the sun?The Hebrew repeats עמל (ʿ-m-l), toil, in both verses. Ecclesiastes 1:3 asks what toil yields; 2:22 sharpens the question by repeating that same root for both the burden of labor and the act of laboring.
Read the SDV Bible.
Every verse has a Deep Dive in the app.
The iPhone Bible app with the Selah Decoded Version.
Does something in this reading look wrong? Tell us