Nothing New Under the Sun
ALREADY ANSWERED · ALREADY QUOTED · No. 2
Where the saying comes from, and what the rest of the passage says
The waiting room at the tire place has a television bolted up in the corner, and nobody watches it on purpose. Thursday afternoon it was running the same story it had been running all week. A man in the chair across from me looked up at it for a second, said "Nothing new under the sun," to nobody in particular, and went back to his phone.
He was quoting the Bible. Not loosely, either. That sentence sits in there almost exactly as he said it, written by a man who was not making conversation. I did not think less of him for not knowing where it came from. I have said the same line in the same tone more times than I could count.
I keep a list. Phrases like that one, said by people who have no idea they are quoting anything, all of them out of the seven books in the middle of the Bible that this blog has been about from the beginning. You knew it by heart. You never knew whose. This is the second entry.
It comes from Ecclesiastes. The man who wrote it calls himself Qoheleth, which is less a name than a job description, something in the neighborhood of the Assembler or the Preacher. He is writing more than two thousand years ago, and he opens the book by taking inventory of everything a person can chase and reporting back that none of it holds. Then he says this: "What has been, that will be; what has been done, that will be done. Nothing is new under the sun!"
Read that last sentence again and notice how little has happened to it. Most of the phrases in this series came into English through the old translations and got worn smooth on the way, which is usually where the story is. This one is the exception. The King James has "there is no new thing under the sun," which is not how anybody says it now. The version we actually use is nearly word for word what a Catholic reads today. More than two thousand years of handling, and the sentence came through almost intact.
The words survived. The meaning did not.
We use it to close a subject. Somebody describes a scandal or a trend or an argument, and "nothing new under the sun" is the polite way of saying you have heard enough. It is a shrug with a pedigree. It means: this is not interesting, and I am not going to be surprised by it.
Qoheleth was not doing that. He was not bored. Two sentences later, in the same breath, he says what he actually meant: "There is no remembrance of past generations; nor will future generations be remembered by those who come after them."
That is the rest of it. He is not complaining that the world has run out of material. He is saying that everyone who came before has already been forgotten, and that the people coming after will forget you too. The sun keeps rising on the same story because there is nobody left who remembers the last time it happened. Now go back and read "nothing is new under the sun" with that attached to it. It is not weariness. It is a man looking straight at how short a life is and how fast the record of it closes.
He does not leave us there, and this is the part of Ecclesiastes that surprises people who only know its reputation for gloom. Having established that you will be forgotten, he does not tell you to build a monument. He does not tell you to make your mark, or to go find something that finally is new. He tells you to go have lunch.
"Go, eat your bread with joy and drink your wine with a merry heart, because it is now that God favors your works."
That is his answer to the fear of being erased, and it is not a consolation prize handed over at the end. It is the argument. If what you were counting on was being remembered, that was never going to hold your weight. What is left is the day you are actually standing in, the bread you are actually eating, and the God who, he says, favors the work of your hands right now. Ecclesiastes spends twelve chapters clearing away everything that cannot carry a life, and when he is finished the ordinary day is the thing still standing.
Psychologists came at half of this the long way around. In 1971 Philip Brickman and Donald Campbell described what they called the hedonic treadmill: people adjust to their circumstances, good ones and bad ones, and settle back toward a baseline, so the new thing stops feeling new and the chase starts over. Later researchers have argued the picture is more complicated than that, that baselines do move and not everyone returns to the same place, and I would not want to oversell a fifty-year-old idea. But the direction is the one Qoheleth was pointing. Novelty is a poor place to build. What the research does not supply, because that is not its job, is what to do instead. He had that part.
I had my own version of that shrug. Not in a waiting room, and not about the news, but the same reflex, and years of it. I never stopped believing. I stopped being curious, which is a quieter way to leave. Whatever they were going to say on Sunday, I was fairly sure I had heard it. Nothing new under the sun, in exactly that tone, aimed at seven books I had never actually read. I was past forty when I finally opened them and found out how much I had been certain of without ever checking.
So that is the second entry. A sentence people use to end conversations, written by a man who was not ending one. He meant it as the hardest thing he knew about being a person, and then he answered it with bread and wine and the afternoon in front of him, which is a stranger and a better answer than the shrug has any idea it is carrying.
You will probably still say it. I still do. You will just be saying more than you meant to.
If you know someone who says this one, and most of us know several, you could send it over without comment. The rest of the passage does the work.
Already quoted. Already answered.
Ecclesiastes is one of the seven Wisdom Books explored in The Original Search Engine. Learn more at solomongraybooks.com/the-book.
The overheard scenes in this series are figures, the way Job is a figure. See Post 0 for a note on the people in this series.
Qoheleth's words are quoted from the New American Bible, Revised Edition (Ecclesiastes 1:9, 1:11, and 9:7).