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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.comKeil and Delitzsch Commentary - Ecclesiastes 6:7 - 6:7
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“All the labour of man is for his mouth, and yet his soul has never enough;” or, properly, it is not filled, so that it desires nothing further and nothing more; נִמְלָא used as appropriately of the soul as of the ear, Ecc 1:8; for that the mouth and the soul are here placed opposite to one another as “organs of the purely sensual and therefore transitory enjoyment, and of the deeper and more spiritual and therefore more lasting kind of joys” (Zöck.), is an assertion which brings out of the text what it wishes to be in it, - נֶפֶשׁ and פֶּה stand here so little in contrast, that, as at Pro 16:26; Isa 5:14; Isa 29:8, instead of the soul the stomach could also be named; for it is the soul longing, and that after the means from without of self-preservation, that is here meant; נפשׁ היפה, “beautiful soul,” Chullin iv. 7, is an appetite which is not fastidious, but is contented. גַּמוְ, καὶ ὃμως ὃμως δέ, as at Ecc 3:13; Psa 129:2. All labour, the author means to say, is in the service of the impulse after self-preservation; and yet, although it concentrates all its efforts after this end, it does not bring full satisfaction to the longing soul. This is grounded in the fact that, however in other respects most unlike, men are the same in their unsatisfied longing.