Vanity

Vanity is conspicuously absent from Jotham's building program — the text notes he built infrastructure that served his people rather than monuments that glorified himself.

Vanity here translates *hevel*, the book's central thesis word, used in its most emphatic superlative form — 'vanity of vanities' — to declare that everything under the sun is ultimately as insubstantial as mist.

Vanity — the book's defining theme — is invoked here as the interpretive lens for Solomon's sardonic line about money: the claim that wealth solves everything is itself a form of empty, misplaced confidence.

Vanity — Ecclesiastes' signature theme — reappears here as a reminder that even good seasons and joys are passing, giving urgency to the call to rejoice rather than sleepwalk through them.

Vanity is named here as the recurring verdict Solomon has rendered across eleven chapters — the lens through which every human endeavor has been evaluated before his closing argument begins.

Vanity is implicitly contrasted here — Solomon argues that God's remembrance of lost seasons and departed people means nothing is truly meaningless, pushing back against the emptiness he names elsewhere in Ecclesiastes.