opposite equally well. Absurdity is by no means a modern concept, one that might be considered a priori unlikely to appear in an ancient text. I am not aware, however, of any single word in Hebrew, Egyptian, or Akkadian that expresses the concept as well as does hebel in Qohelet’s usage. There are other terms in the semantic field of “counter-rational” that have been suggested as equivalents of hebel. E. Good has argued that hebel means “incongruous”, a sense close to “irony” or “ironic”, (1965:176–83),