a straining after something: the reaching of a person's will toward what it wants and cannot hold.
This word turns up only three times in the whole Hebrew Bible, all of them in Ecclesiastes, and twice it is half of a single phrase: this or that, the writer says, is "a chasing of wind." The picture is of effort aimed at something no hand closes on. The wind is real, it can be felt, and it can never be gathered, so the pursuit itself is the emptiness.
The third occurrence is the one that pins the meaning down. At Ecclesiastes 2:22 the word stands free of the wind phrase and is joined to the heart instead: what does a person get from all his labor "and from the straining of his heart"? A heart does not herd or graze anything, so the word has to name inner reaching, the aim a person sets and then spends himself on.
Ecclesiastes keeps this word in company with two others. הֶבֶל is the vapor word, the verdict that a thing has no substance, and עָמָל is the grinding labor that wears a person out. Set together they judge the same life from three angles: nothing solid in it, hard work through it, and a reaching that closes on air. Its feminine partner רְעוּת fills the same wind phrase seven more times in the book.
Where the word came from is still argued. Most scholars now trace it to a family of words meaning "to will" or "to desire" that Hebrew took over from Aramaic, which fits the fact that it shows up in one late book and nowhere else; the Aramaic of Daniel uses the same noun (רַעְיוֹן) for the thoughts that alarm a king. An older line of scholarship derived it instead from the ordinary verb for pasturing a flock (רָעָה), which yields the memorable picture of a man trying to graze the wind.
Nuances
Disputed
Whether the noun derives from an Aramaic root meaning "to will, to desire", yielding "pursuit of wind", or from the common Hebrew verb "to pasture", yielding "feeding on wind".
- majorityAn Aramaic loanword meaning striving or pursuit, so the phrase names futile human aspiration rather than a pastoral image.; HALOT, s.v. רַעְיוֹן; Wilhelm Gesenius, Hebräisches und Aramäisches Handwörterbuch über das Alte Testament, 18th ed., ed. Rudolf Meyer, Herbert Donner et al. (Springer, 1987-2010), s.v. רַעְיוֹן; Michael V. Fox, A Time to Tear Down and a Time to Build Up: A Rereading of Ecclesiastes (Eerdmans, 1999), 42-47; Choon-Leong Seow, Ecclesiastes, Anchor Bible 18C (Doubleday, 1997), 121-122; Antoon Schoors, The Preacher Sought to Find Pleasing Words: A Study of the Language of Qoheleth, Part 2, OLA 143 (Peeters, 2004), 439-444
- minorityA native Hebrew formation from the verb for pasturing, so the phrase pictures feeding on or herding the wind, on the analogy of Hosea 12:1, where Ephraim feeds on wind.; Franz Delitzsch, Commentary on the Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes, trans. M. G. Easton (T. & T. Clark, 1891), on Ecclesiastes 1:14; R. N. Whybray, Ecclesiastes, New Century Bible (Eerdmans, 1989), on Ecclesiastes 1:14; Graham S. Ogden, Qoheleth, 2nd ed., Readings (Sheffield Phoenix, 2007)