Ecclesiastes 7: What the Passage Says

The Chapter in a Sentence

The Teacher collects sayings that compare things people usually rank the other way: a funeral over a feast, sorrow over laughter, a rebuke from the wise over the song of fools, patience over pride. He says wisdom protects a person like money does, but no one can straighten what God has bent, and God sets good days and hard days side by side so no one can figure out what comes next. He observes that a righteous man can perish in his righteousness while a wicked man lives long, warns against extremes in either direction, and says no one on earth does good and never sins. He then describes his own search for wisdom, which stayed out of reach, and ends with what he did find: God made people upright, but they have gone looking for many schemes.

Claim by Claim

1. 7:1
   • A good name is better than good perfumed oil.
   • The day of death is better than the day of one's birth.
2. 7:2
   • It is better to go to a house of mourning than to go to a house of feasting.
   • Mourning is better because death is the end of every man.
   • The living person will take this to heart.
3. 7:3
   • Vexation is better than laughter.
   • By a sad face the heart is made good.
4. 7:4
   • The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning.
   • The heart of fools is in the house of gladness.
5. 7:5
   • It is better to hear the rebuke of a wise man than for a man to hear the song of fools.
6. 7:6
   • The laughter of the fool is like the sound of thorns crackling under a pot.
   • This also is futile.
7. 7:7
   • Oppression makes a wise man act like a fool.
   • A gift destroys the heart.
8. 7:8
   • The end of a matter is better than its beginning.
   • The patient in spirit is better than the proud in spirit.
9. 7:9
   • Do not be hasty in your spirit to become angry.
   • Anger rests in the lap of fools.
10. 7:10
    • Do not say, 'Why were the former days better than these?'
    • To ask this is not asked out of wisdom.
11. 7:11
    • Wisdom is good along with an inheritance.
    • Wisdom is an advantage to those who see the sun.
12. 7:12
    • Wisdom is a shade.
    • Money is a shade.
    • The advantage of knowledge is that wisdom preserves the life of the one who has it.
13. 7:13
    • Consider the work of God.
    • No one can make straight what God has made crooked.
14. 7:14
    • In the day of good, be in good.
    • In the day of evil, consider.
    • God has made the one alongside the other.
    • God did this so that man should find nothing that comes after him.
15. 7:15
    • The speaker has seen everything in the days of his futility.
    • There is a righteous man who perishes in his righteousness.
    • There is a wicked man who prolongs his life in his wickedness.
16. 7:16
    • Do not be excessively righteous.
    • Do not make yourself excessively wise.
    • The question is asked why you should ruin yourself.
17. 7:17
    • Do not be excessively wicked.
    • Do not be a fool.
    • The question is asked why you should die before your time.
18. 7:18
    • It is good that you take hold of this.
    • Do not let your hand withdraw from that.
    • The one who fears God will come through them all.
19. 7:19
    • Wisdom makes the wise man stronger than ten rulers who are in a city.
20. 7:20
    • There is no righteous man on earth who does good and does not sin.
21. 7:21
    • Do not set your heart on all the words that are spoken.
    • Otherwise you may hear your servant cursing you.
22. 7:22
    • Your own heart knows that many times you yourself have likewise cursed others.
23. 7:23
    • The speaker tested all of this by wisdom.
    • The speaker said, 'I will be wise.'
    • Wisdom was far from him.
24. 7:24
    • What is is far off.
    • It is deep, exceedingly deep.
    • The question is asked who can find it out.
25. 7:25
    • The speaker turned his heart to know and to explore.
    • The speaker sought wisdom and the sum of things.
    • The speaker sought to know wickedness as folly and foolishness as madness.
26. 7:26
    • The speaker finds the woman more bitter than death.
    • Her heart is snares and nets.
    • Her hands are chains.
    • The one who is good before God escapes from her.
    • The sinner is caught by her.
27. 7:27
    • The speaker says to look at this that he has found.
    • The Preacher is the one who says it.
    • He found it by adding one thing to one thing to find the sum.
28. 7:28
    • The speaker's soul was still seeking something he did not find.
    • He found one man among a thousand.
    • He did not find a woman among all these.
29. 7:29
    • This alone the speaker has found.
    • God made man upright.
    • Men have sought out many schemes.

Words Worth Explaining

Every language note in this chapter, gathered. These explain what a word meant, never what it means for the reader.

7:1

Perfumed oil was a costly luxury in the ancient Near East, used for grooming, hospitality and burial; it was stored as wealth the way jewelry might be. The line also turns on a pun that English cannot carry: the Hebrew for "name" is *shem* and for "oil/perfume" *shemen*.

7:2

A "house of mourning" is a household in the middle of a funeral. Mourning was a public, communal affair lasting seven days or more, with visitors coming to the bereaved home to weep, sit with the family and eat a mourners' meal. The "house of feasting" is its opposite: a banquet, likewise held over days.

7:3

"Heart" in Hebrew is not the seat of feeling as opposed to thought. It is the whole inner person, mind, will, judgment and emotion together. Throughout this chapter, wherever "heart" appears, read something closer to "mind" or "inner self".

7:4

"Mirth" is an old word for fun and laughter.

7:5

A "rebuke" is telling someone plainly that they did something wrong.

7:6

Dry thornbush was cheap, quick-burning fuel: it flares up with a lot of loud snapping and is gone before the pot is hot. The Hebrew adds a pun, *sirim* (thorns) under a *sir* (pot). "Empty" here translates *hebel*, literally vapor or a puff of breath, the key word of Ecclesiastes, used nearly forty times for what is fleeting, insubstantial and impossible to grasp. The King James renders it "vanity", which in 1611 meant emptiness or futility, not conceit.

7:7

"Oppression" here means squeezing money out of people by force or cheating. A "gift" in this verse is a bribe, money slipped to a judge or official.

7:9

The "lap" or "bosom" is the fold of a loose garment at the chest, where a person carried possessions close to the body. To say anger settles there is to say the fool keeps it on him, carried about rather than set down.

7:11

An inheritance is money or land handed to you when someone in your family dies. "Them that see the sun" simply means people who are alive.

7:12

The Hebrew word behind the King James "defence" is literally "shade" or "shadow". In that climate shade is not a pleasant extra but survival, so it became a standard image for protection, the shelter of a wall, a patron or a king.

7:14

The last clause is deliberately open in Hebrew. "Find out anything after him" can mean discover what the future holds, or discover what will happen once he is gone. The wording does not settle which, and the rendering leaves it unsettled.

7:15

A "just man" is someone who does what is right. Older English used "just" that way, not only to mean fair.

7:16

This verse and the next have been argued over for centuries. The Hebrew verb forms can mean "be righteous / be wise" or "make yourself out to be righteous / play the wise man", so the advice may warn against righteousness pressed to extremes, or against a performance of it. The rendering keeps both readings open.

7:18

"The one" and "the other" are the two warnings just given in verses 16 and 17. The closing phrase is literally "will go out with both of them", an idiom that can mean either escapes both dangers or discharges both obligations.

7:19

The Hebrew word means men who hold power, city officials or magistrates, rather than the warriors suggested by the King James "mighty men". Cities of the period were governed by a small body of such men, and "ten" pictures a full complement of them.

7:20

To "sin" means to do wrong. It means breaking God's rules.

7:21

The Hebrew verb here means to belittle, disparage or speak lightly of someone. It does not require calling down a supernatural curse; it covers ordinary bad-mouthing behind a person's back.

7:23

"Proved" is an old word meaning tested or tried out.

7:25

"Folly" is an old word for being foolish.

7:26

Snare, net and chains are hunting and fishing equipment, the vocabulary of trapping game. The Hebrew has a definite article, "the woman", and readers have long disagreed whether it points to a particular type already familiar from the wisdom writings (the seductress of Proverbs) or makes a sweeping statement about women; the Hebrew does not decide it.

7:27

"The Teacher" (the King James has "the Preacher") translates the Hebrew title *Qoheleth*, from a verb meaning to gather or assemble. It denotes someone who convenes an assembly and addresses it, not a preacher in the modern religious sense. The counting language that follows ("one by one", "the account") is drawn from bookkeeping.

7:28

The Hebrew says only "one *adam* among a thousand I found", what kind of one is left unstated, which is why translations supply words like "upright". *Adam* can mean a human being in general or a male in particular, and the contrast with "woman" in the second half is what makes the reading here specific. Some readers take the whole line as a saying the Teacher is quoting rather than one he endorses.

7:29

"Man" here is *adam*, humankind collectively rather than a male individual. "Inventions" in the King James means devices, contrivances or schemes, not inventions in the modern technological sense; the Hebrew noun comes from the same counting-and-reckoning vocabulary used in verses 25 and 27, so the sense is calculations people have worked out for themselves.