To say there is ‘nothing new under the sun’ is to say that whatever strikes us as novel has, in truth, been seen before. The phrase is a weary, worldly observation: fashions and follies come round again, and human nature does not change. It is usually offered with a shrug rather than in triumph.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘nothing new under the sun’?
The phrase comes straight from the Bible, from the opening chapter of Ecclesiastes. The book is a sustained meditation on the futility of worldly striving, traditionally ascribed to Solomon and written in Hebrew under the name Qoheleth, ‘the Preacher’. Its most famous refrain is the expression ‘under the sun’, which recurs some thirty times across the book as a way of saying ‘here on earth, in this mortal life’.
The sentence in question is Ecclesiastes 1:9. When the King James Bible appeared in 1611 it was rendered in the form that has echoed through English ever since:
The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.
The verse that follows presses the point home, anticipating the reader who thinks they have found an exception: ‘Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us.’
The idea travelled into English through Latin long before 1611. Jerome’s fourth-century Vulgate gave the line as nihil sub sole novum, ‘nothing new under the sun’, a tag compact enough that it later found its way onto sundials and into common learned speech. Earlier English translations carried the same sense: John Wycliffe’s followers rendered it in the 1380s, and the Geneva Bible of 1560, the Bible of Shakespeare’s generation, kept the now-familiar shape of the thought.
What shifted over time was the exact wording. The older biblical form is ‘no new thing under the sun’, and that phrasing held for centuries. The modern idiom ‘nothing new under the sun’ is a slight, natural rearrangement that lifts the clause out of scripture and turns it into a stand-alone saying, one that can be dropped into conversation about anything from politics to pop music without a hint of the pulpit about it.
Like many biblical proverbs, it has settled into everyday English as plain wisdom rather than religious teaching. It sits comfortably alongside the other great fatalistic sayings the language has absorbed, such as ‘nothing is certain but death and taxes’ and the gentler counsel to ‘make hay while the sun shines’. All of them share the same clear-eyed view of a world that turns in circles, and all of them, fittingly enough, prove the very point that there is nothing new under the sun.