Great Regulars: "For the fate of the sons of man

and the fate of the beast is a single fate. As one dies so dies the other, and all have a single spirit, and man's advantage over the beast is naught, for everything is mere breath. Everything goes to a single place. Everything was from the dust, and everything goes back to the dust. Who knows whether man's spirit goes upward and the beast's spirit goes down to the earth?"

The passage (which also serves, in German, as the text for a grimly beautiful song by Brahms) is a good example of how [Robert] Alter's English differs from the King James Version. Where Alter has "mere breath," the KJV has "vanity"; the famous opening line of Ecclesiastes, "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity," becomes Alter's "Merest breath, merest breath. . . . All is mere breath."

from Adam Kirsch: Tablet: Counter-Revelations

~~~~~~~~~~~