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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.comKeil and Delitzsch Commentary - Ecclesiastes 6:3 - 6:3
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“If a man begat an hundred, and lived many years, and the amount of the days of his years was great, and his soul satisfied not itself in good, and also he had no grave, then I say: Better than he is the untimely birth.†The accentuation of 3a is like that of 2a. The disjunctives follow the Athnach, as at 2Ki 23:13, only that there Telisha Gedhola stands for Pazer. Hitzig finds difficulty with the clause לו ... וג×Ö¾, and regards it as a marginal gloss to 5a, taken up into the text at a wrong place. But just the unexpected form and the accidental nature, more than the inward necessity of this feature in the figure, leads us to conclude that the author here connects together historical facts, as conjecturally noted above, into one fanciful picture. מֵ×ָה is obviously to be supplemented by (×•×‘× ×•×ª) ×‘× ×™×; the Targ. and Midrash make this man to be Cain, Ahab, Haman, and show at least in this that they extend down into the time of the Persian kingdom a spark of historical intelligence. שָ×ןִ רַבּ interchanges with שָ×ןִ הַרְ, Ecc 11:8, as at Neh 11:30. In order to designate the long life emphatically, the author expresses the years particularly in days: “and if it is much which (Heiligst.: multum est quod) the days of his years amount to;†cf. יְמְי וַיִּהְיוּ, in Gen 5. With venaphsho there follows the reverse side of this long life with many children: (1) his soul satisfies not itself, i.e., has no self-satisfying enjoyment of the good (min, as at Psa 104:13, etc.), i.e., of all the good things which he possesses, - in a word, he is not happy in his life; and (2) an honourable burial is not granted to him, but קְב ×—Ö²×, Jer 22:19, which is the contrary of a burial such as becomes a man (the body of Artaxerxes Ochus was thrown to the cats); whereupon Elster rightly remarks that in an honourable burial and an honourable remembrance, good fortune, albeit shaded with sadness, might be seen. But when now, to one so rich in children and so long-lived, neither enjoyment of his good fortune nor even this shaded glory of an honourable burial is allowed, the author cannot otherwise judge than that the untimely birth is better than he. In this section regarding the uncertainty of riches, we have already, Ecc 5:14, fallen on a reminiscence from the Book of Job; it is so much the more probable that here also Job 3:16 has an influence on the formation of the thought. × Ö°×¤Ö¶×œ is the foetus which comes lifeless from the mother's womb.