By asking rather than declaring, the Preacher invites readers to calculate the profit themselves and confront the sobering reality that labor for wealth yields no lasting advantage when death strips everything away.

The Preacher does not receive a verbal answer but continues his meditation, eventually concluding in Ecclesiastes 12:13-14 that fearing God and keeping His commandments constitutes the whole duty of man.

The question distills Ecclesiastes’ central agony: what is the net return on a lifetime of labor when death reduces the ledger to zero? The Hebrew yitron (profit) is an accounting term demanding a balance sheet, and the Preacher’s brutal math shows expenditure without gain. The imagery of ‘toiling for the wind’ uses ruach, which means both wind and spirit, creating a wordplay on grasping at what is both invisible and uncontrollable. Why pose this as a question rather than a flat statement? Because the interrogative form forces the reader to do the calculation themselves, to sit with the uncomfortable silence that follows, and to feel the full weight of life’s brevity. The theological freight is immense: apart from God, all human striving ends in emptiness, and only what is done in fear of the Lord survives eternity’s audit.