Background
Glossary
The words from Ecclesiastes and the words this site uses, each in a sentence or two.
From Ecclesiastes
- Ecclesiastes
- The book’s name comes from the Greek for the title its speaker gives himself. In Hebrew he is Qohelet, roughly the one who gathers people together and speaks to them.Ecclesiastes 1:1
- The Preacher
- The usual English name for Qohelet, and the name the ESV and this site use for him.Ecclesiastes 1:1
- Hevel
- The Hebrew word the Preacher uses for almost everything, about forty times. It means vapor or breath: real, and impossible to hold. The King James Version and the ESV say vanity; the NIV says meaningless.Ecclesiastes 1:2
- Under the sun
- The Preacher’s phrase for life as it looks from here, in this world and in time. It appears twenty-nine times.Ecclesiastes 1:3
- Nothing better
- The phrase the Preacher comes back to when he says what is worth doing: eat and drink, find enjoyment in your work, be joyful, do good. This site takes its name from it.Ecclesiastes 2:24
- Portion
- What has been given to you: your share, your lot. The ESV uses both portion and lot for the same Hebrew word, for the life, the work and the joy set in front of you.Ecclesiastes 5:18; 9:9
- Toil
- Hard work and the weariness that comes with it. The Preacher uses the word again and again for daily work, and still tells people to find enjoyment in it.Ecclesiastes 2:24
- Eternity in the heart
- The longing God has put in every person for more than this life, with the limit that no one can find out the whole. Both at once.Ecclesiastes 3:11
On this site
- The three longings
- The three shapes that eternity in the heart takes: the Infinite, the longing for possibility; the Indelible, the longing for permanence; and the Ideal, the longing for perfection. Each comes with a fear: getting stuck, loss, and falling short.
- The four lenses
- Four ways of looking at the same moment: Material, the things in your hands; Physical, your body and your day; Relational, the people around you; and Emotional, what is in your heart. Most of us look through one and miss the others.
- The five gifts
- What Ecclesiastes says there is nothing better than: to feast with friends, do some good, enjoy your partner, share your stuff, and opt for joy.
- The five words
- The five gifts in one word each: Feast. Work. Love. Give. Rejoice.
- Play
- Joy practiced. Joy in motion. The opposite of play is not work. It’s the white-knuckle grip: grasping for ever more control.
- The ten forces
- Ten things that keep joy from being put in motion, most of them looking like virtues: Seriousness, Discontentment, Resentment, Time, Religion, Family, Self-Protection, Languishing, Atrophy and Control.
- Rule of life
- A Rule of Life is not a list of rules. It is a structure that gives shape to freedom: a few chosen practices, kept daily and weekly and reviewed each season.
- Nothing Better
- The rule of life on this site, drawn from the five nothing better passages and from Ecclesiastes as a whole. What Is Nothing Better? has it on one page; The Practices is what to do each day, each week and each season.
- Regula
- Latin for a straightedge, the ruler a builder uses to draw a true line. It is where the word rule in rule of life comes from. Many people picture it as a trellis.