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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.comKeil and Delitzsch Commentary - Ecclesiastes 2:16 - 2:16
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“For no remembrance of the wise, as of the fool, remains for ever; since in the days that are to come they are all forgotten. And how dieth the wise man: as the fool!” As in Ecc 1:11, so here זִכְרוֹן is the principal form, not different from זִכָּרוֹן. Having no remembrance forever, is equivalent to having no eternal endurance, having simply no onward existence (Ecc 9:6). עִם is both times the comparat. combin., as at Ecc 7:11; Job 9:26; Job 37:18; cf. יַחַד, Psa 49:11. There are, indeed, individual historically great men, the memory of whom is perpetuated from generation to generation in words and in monuments; but these are exceptions, which do not always show that posterity is able to distinguish between wise men and fools. As a rule, men have a long appreciating recollection of the wise as little as they have of the fools, for long ago (vid., beshekvar, p. 640) in the coming days (כְּבָ אָבָּ, accus. of the time, like the ellipt.הב, Isa 27:6) all are forgotten; הַכֹּל is, as at Psa 14:3, meant personally: the one as the other; and נִשְׁכָּח is rendered by the Masora, like Psa 9:6, כְּבָ אָבָ, as the pausal form of the finite; but is perhaps thought of as part., denoting that which only in the coming days will become too soon a completed fact, since those who survive go from the burial of the one, as well as from that of the other, to the ordinary duties of the day. Death thus sinks the wise man, as it does the fool, in eternal oblivion; it comes to both, and brings the same to both, which extorted from the author the cry: How dieth the wise man? as the fool! Why is the fate which awaits both thus the same! This is the pointed, sarcastic אֵיךְ (how!) of the satirical Mashal, e.g., Isa 14:4; Eze 26:17; and יָמוּת is = moriendum est, as at 2Sa 3:3, moriendum erat. Rambach well: איך est h. l. particula admirationis super rei indignitate.
What happened to the author from this sorrowful discovery he now states.