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The Book of Qohelet awakes curiosity in the reader already because of its title. In assigning a title to this book, modern translations of Qohelet follow the trace of the Old Greek of the LXX (Ecclesiastes, Der Prediger). It is striking, however, that the title Qohelet appears mostly in the framing chapters of the book, where it is enhanced with a few (fictitious) biographical notes. Beyond the framing sections, Qohelet appears only once more, where the commentators suggest to be considered a descriptive note (comment), probably a gloss. One of the main tasks of the Qohelet-commentators was and is to try to find a proper translation for the noun Qohelet. This article would also like to contribute to this discussion.

The Hebrew root הבל is one of the most frequent expressions of the book of Qohelet, so to say one of the keywords of his theology. Besides, within the entire Old Testament, this term appears most frequently in this book. Insofar as הבל carries a value judgment for the message of Qohelet, this term is hugely important. Within the history of research, scholars either concentrate on specific loci of the occurrences or focus on the Hebrew expression in general. In our article, we attempt to categorize all occurrences of הבל according to its contexts in the Book of Qohelet and detect the theological meaning and relevance in both his narrow and the wider literal context. Furthermore, we aim to detect the influence of Qohelet’s special vocabulary in its narrow context of the הבל-paraphrases.

Following the democratic transformations of 1989, the churches in Hungary had to face the altering of their former social position. While the churches were not neglected anymore, they were unprepared to occupy their places in the civil society. The change was especially challenging for local congregations who had to fight the eroding folk church structures. Should the church wish to occupy a prominent position in the civil society, serious social commitment and proper mediation of the Gospel are both equally important. The church needs to take a proactive role.