What the religious teacher found out about wisdom

12 I, the Religious Teacher, have been the king of Israel for many years, ruling in Jerusalem. 13 By being wise, I concentrated on understanding everything that was being done on the earth [MTY]. But I found out that God causes all of us to experience things that cause us to be unhappy/miserable. 14 It seems that nothing that happens on the earth really enables us to do anything useful. It is like [MET] chasing the wind.

15 Many things that are crooked cannot be caused to become straight;

we cannot count things that do not exist.

16 I said to myself, “Hey, I am wiser than any of the kings that ruled in Jerusalem before I became the king. I am wiser and I know more than any of them!” 17 So I determined to learn more about being wise and to learn about knowing about many things, and also to learn about doing things that are very foolish [DOU]. But I found out that trying to understand those things was also useless, like chasing the wind.

18 The wiser I became, the more disappointed I became.

The more things I knew about, the sadder I became.