Ecclesiastes 1:3
Ecclesiastes 1:33What does a man gain from all his labor, at which he toils under the sun?
— "What profit does a man have in all his hard work at which he toils under the sun?" — frames Solomon's "under the sun" perspective. The Watchtower uses this frame to defend soul-sleep readings of later Ecclesiastes passages: ("the dead are conscious of nothing at all") is then taken as describing what actually happens at death rather than what death looks like from a human vantage point.
"Under the sun" is the interpretive key Ecclesiastes itself supplies. Solomon's wisdom experiment surveys life as it appears from below — without the vantage of divine revelation, and often explicitly bracketing it. Verse 3 sets the frame: under the sun. Every apparent nihilism that follows is coloured by that limitation. When says the dead know nothing, the limitation is what the living know about the dead, not what God's revelation tells us about their actual state. Jesus, who came from heaven and speaks from above, provides the corrective: "fear the one who can destroy both soul and body in Gehenna" ( NWT) — the soul survives physical death and is reachable only by God. Stephen prays "Lord Jesus, receive my spirit" () and Jesus promises the thief "today you will be with me in paradise" (). The "under the sun" vantage of Ecclesiastes is real, but it is not the whole of biblical revelation on death.