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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.comKeil and Delitzsch Commentary - Ecclesiastes 3:19 - 3:19
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“For the children of men are a chance, and the beast a chance, and they both have once chance: as the death of the one, so that death of the other, and they have all one breath; and there is no advantage to a man over a beast, for all is vain.” If in both instances the word is pointed מִקְרֵה (lxx), the three-membered sentence would then have the form of an emblematical proverb (as e.g., Pro 25:25): “For as the chance of men, so (vav of comparison) the chance of the beast; they have both one chance.” מקרֶה with segol cannot possibly be the connecting form (Luzz.), for in cases such as מע שֶׂ ם, Isa 3:24, the relation of the words is appositional, not genitival. This form מקרֶ, thus found three times, is vindicated by the Targ. (also the Venet.) and by Mss.; Joseph Kimchi remarks that “all three have segol, and are thus forms of the absolutus.” The author means that men, like beasts, are in their existence and in their death influenced accidentally, i.e., not of necessity, and are wholly conditioned, not by their own individual energy, but by a power from without - are dependent beings, as Solon (Herod. i. 32) says to Croesus: “Man is altogether συμφορή,” i.e., the sport of accident. The first two sentences mean exclusively neither that men (apart from God) are, like beasts, the birth of a blind accident (Hitz.), nor that they are placed under the same law of transitoriness (Elst.); but of men, in the totality of their being, and doing, and suffering, it is first said that they are accidental beings; then, that which separates them from this, that they all, men like beasts, are finally exposed to one, i.e., to the same fate. As is the death of one, so is the death of the other; and they all have one breath, i.e., men and beasts alike die, for this breath of life (חַיִּים רוּחַ, which constitutes a beast - as well as a man a חַיָּה נֶפֶשׁ) departs from the body (Psa 104:29). In זֶה ... זֶה (as at Ecc 6:5; Exo 14:20, and frequently), לָהֶם (mas. as genus potius) is separately referred to men and beasts. With the Mishnic בְּמוֹת = bibl. כְּמוֹ (cf. Maaser Sheni, v. 2), the כְּמוֹת here used has manifestly nothing to do. The noun מוֹתָר, which in the Book of Proverbs (Pro 14:23; Pro 21:5, not elsewhere) occurs in the sense of profit, gain, is here in the Book of Koheleth found as a synon. of יִתְרוֹן, “preference,” advantage which is exclusively peculiar to it. From this, that men and beasts fall under the same law of death, the author concludes that there is no preference of a man to a beast; he doubtless means that in respect of the end man has no superiority; but he expresses himself thus generally because, as the matter presented itself to him, all-absorbing death annulled every distinction. He looks only to the present time, without encumbering himself with the historical account of the matter found in the beginning of the Tôra; and he adheres to the external phenomenon, without thinking, with the Psalmist in Ps 49, that although death is common to man with the beast, yet all men do not therefore die as the beast does. That the beast dies because it must, but that in the midst of this necessity of nature man can maintain his freedom, is for him out of view. הֲֽבֶל הַכֹּל, the ματαιότης, which at last falls to man as well as to the beast, throws its long dark shadows across his mind, and wholly shrouds it.