What Does Ecclesiastes 2:18 Mean in the King James?
Yea, I hated all my labour which I had taken under the sun: because I should leave it unto the man that shall be after me.
The analysis reads the King James wording.
King James Version The King James Version, first published in 1611. Selah Verse shows the standard text.
THE KEY
The verb translated “leave” carries the sense of letting something settle, so the worker’s labor ends in release from their hands.
THE MEANING
The work you have done can become a source of grief when you see it passing to someone who comes after you. What occupies your hands now cannot remain yours forever.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The verse undoes the belief that hard work can secure permanent ownership: its fruit eventually passes beyond the worker’s control.
THE ROOT
אַנִּיחֶנּוּ
anniḥennu
GROWS FROM
נוח
nuaḥ
Rest, settle, come to rest.
The verb translated “leave” is a causative form of נוח: to let something settle or rest. The handoff carries an image of setting accumulated work down for the person who comes next, beyond the worker’s own keeping.
ALSO GROWS
menuchah: Rest, resting place.
מְנוּחָה
The same root names a place of rest, opening “leave it” as letting the work come to rest beyond the worker’s tenure.
hēnîaḥ: Set down, let rest, leave behind.
הֵנִיחַ
This causative form makes the verse’s transfer concrete: the labor is set down into another person’s hands.
THE PATTERN
What a person accumulates in a lifetime can pass into another’s hands beyond the worker’s control.
For there is a man whose labour is in wisdom, and in knowledge, and in equity; yet to a man that hath not laboured therein shall he leave it for his portion. This also is vanity and a great evil.Surely every man walketh in a vain shew: surely they are disquieted in vain: he heapeth up riches, and knoweth not who shall gather them.But God said unto him, Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee: then whose shall those things be, which thou hast provided?THE THREAD
Until the LORD have given rest unto your brethren, as well as unto you, and until they also possess the land which the LORD your God hath given them beyond Jordan: and then shall ye return every man unto his possession, which I have given you.The Hebrew verb behind “leave” in Ecclesiastes shares the root נוח with “given rest” here. That shared root opens the handoff as letting what is held come to rest beyond oneself.
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