CHAPTER 9

¹For on all this I set my heart to sort out all this—that the righteous and the wise and their acts are in God’s hand. Neither hatred nor love does man know. All before them is mere breath. ²As all have a single fate, the righteous and the wicked, the good and the bad, and the clean and the unclean, and he who offers sacrifice and he who does not sacrifice, the good and the offender, he who vows and he who fears the vow. ³This is the evil in all that is done under the sun, for all have a single fate, and also the heart of the sons of man is full of evil, and mad revelry in their heart while they live, and afterward—off to the dead. ⁴For he who is joined to the living knows one sure thing: that a live dog is better than a dead lion. ⁵For the living know that they will die, and the dead know nothing, and they no longer have recompense, for their memory is forgotten. ⁶Their love and their hatred as well, their jealousy, too, are already lost, and they no longer have any share forever in all that is done under the sun. ⁷Go, eat your bread with rejoicing and drink your wine with a merry heart, for God has already been pleased by your deeds. ⁸At every season let your garments be white, and let oil on your head not be lacking. ⁹Enjoy life with a woman whom you love all your days of mere breath that have been given to you under the sun, all your days of mere breath, for that is your share in life and in your toil that you toil under the sun. ¹⁰All that your hand manages to do with your strength, do, for there is no doing nor reckoning nor knowledge nor wisdom in Sheol where you are going. ¹¹I returned to see under the sun that not to the swift is the race and not to the mighty, the battle, nor to the wise, bread, nor to the discerning, wealth, nor to those who know, favor, for a time of mishap will befall them all. ¹²Nor does man know his time, like fish caught in an evil net and like birds held in a trap, like them the sons of man are ensnared by an evil time when it suddenly falls upon them. ¹³Wisdom, too, have I seen under the sun, and it is great in my eyes. ¹⁴There was a little town, and few people within it, and a great king came against it and went round it and built against it great siege-works. ¹⁵And there was found within it a poor wise man, and that person saved the town through his wisdom, but no one recalled that poor man. ¹⁶I said: Better wisdom than might, but the poor man’s wisdom is scorned and his words are unheard. ¹⁷The words of the wise gently said are heard more than the shout of the ruler among fools. ¹⁸Better wisdom than weapons, yet a single offender destroys much good.

CHAPTER 9 NOTES

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1. are in God’s hand. Though the formulation may sound unexceptionally pious, what is expressed is a sense of fatalism: even the wise and the righteous do not control their own destinies.

Neither hatred nor love does man know. The key term here is “know,” with the emphasis on understanding rather than on experiencing. Every person is of course acquainted with hatred and love but is not able to fathom the meaning or the sources of these powerful emotions.

All before them is mere breath. The Masoretic Text reads “All before them,” followed by a full stop, and then begins the next verse with “all.” Neither “all before them” standing alone nor the second “all” makes much sense. This translation follows the Septuagint and two other ancient versions in reading instead of the second “all,” hakol, “mere breath,” hevel, a difference of one consonant. The sentence then is coherent.

2. the bad. This word is absent in the Masoretic Text but appears in two ancient versions, and all the other positive terms in this verse have a matching negative term.

he who fears the vow. He is afraid to make a vow lest he be unable to fulfill it and suffer dire consequences. In this whole catalogue, Qohelet again stands in opposition to the biblical majority view: it makes no difference what a person does morally or ritually—the same fate of death awaits all. That idea is then vividly stressed in the next three verses.

4. joined. The translation follows the marginal qeri, which reads yeḥubar, instead of the text proper, which has yebuḥar, “chosen.”

knows. Literally, “has.”

a live dog. Dogs in ancient Israel were scavengers, not pets, and hence were despised.

7. Go, eat your bread with rejoicing. This exhortation to enjoy follows logically from the somber meditation on death’s inexorability that has preceded. If the same grim fate awaits us all, we are well advised to take advantage of the pleasures of this life while we have them.

God has already been pleased by your deeds. If you have been granted the good things of this life to enjoy—a loaf of bread, a jug of wine, white garments, a head of hair moistened with oil—that in itself is a sign that you have found favor in God’s eyes.

9. all your days of mere breath. Although some scholars regard the second occurrence of this phrase as an inadvertent scribal duplication, Qohelet throughout exhibits a stylistic fondness for this kind of incantatory repetition.

10. for there is no doing nor reckoning . . . in Sheol where you are going. It is possible that Qohelet’s uncompromising insistence on death as a realm of utter extinction is a polemic response to the new doctrine of an afterlife that was beginning to emerge toward the end of the biblical period.

11. for a time of mishap. The Hebrew ʿet upegaʿ, literally “time and mishap,” is in all likelihood a hendiadys, hence the translation. The phrase is probably an oblique reference to death. Qohelet is not saying that the fastest runner will lose the race or the mighty warrior will be defeated in battle but rather that all human triumphs are temporary and therefore illusory, for death obliterates everything.

12. Nor does man know his time. In consonance with the use of “time” in the previous verse, this means the time of death, as “evil time” later in the verse makes clear. The imagery that follows of trapped fish and birds then concretizes the sense of humankind caught in the grip of its fate of mortality.

13. great in my eyes. The literal sense of the Hebrew is “great to me.”

14. There was a little town. The features of this miniature narrative suggest that it is a hypothetical case rather than a historical anecdote. The whole story is a dialectic challenge to the celebration of wisdom in the preceding verse because it illustrates that if wisdom does not come from a prestigious source, it is liable to be ignored or forgotten.

15. there was found within it. The Hebrew appears to say “he found within it,” but as often is the case in biblical Hebrew, the third-person masculine singular is used in place of a passive verb.

and that person saved the town. Some interpreters understand the verb as a conditional, “that person might have saved the town,” linking this clause with “the poor man’s wisdom is scorned” in the next verse. However, the end of this sentence, “but no one recalled that poor man,” suggests that in fact he saved the town, but afterward his act was forgotten by the townspeople, who preferred not to think that their welfare had depended on the wisdom of a man of lowly status.

16. Better wisdom than might, but the poor man’s wisdom is scorned. Qohelet takes us through still another dialectic turn. Wisdom is a supreme value, but given society’s concern with status, if wisdom is not accompanied by prestige, it will have no audience.

18. yet a single offender destroys much good. This is another observation about the precariousness of the efficacy of wisdom. Wisdom may be more powerful than even the best of weapons, but a single reckless or irresponsible person can do great damage over which the calculations of wisdom have no control.