Ecclesiastes 11:1-6

Take risks; life is short

1 Send your bread out on the water because, in the course of time, you may find it again.

2 Give a portion to seven people, even to eight: you don't know what disaster may come upon the land.

3 If clouds fill up, they will empty out rain on the earth. If a tree falls, whether to the south or to the north, wherever it falls, there it will lie.

4 Those who watch the wind blow will never sow, and those who observe the clouds will never reap.

5 Just as you don't understand what the life-breath does in the fetus inside a pregnant woman's womb, so you can't understand the work of God, who makes everything happen.

6 Scatter your seed in the morning, and in the evening don't be idle because you don't know which will succeed, this one or that, or whether both will be equally good.

Ecclesiastes 11:1-6 Meaning and Commentary

INTRODUCTION TO ECCLESIASTES 11

This chapter begins with an exhortation to liberality to the poor, enforced by several reasons and arguments, and the objections to it removed; and the whole illustrated by various similes, Ec 11:1-6; and then it is observed, that a life attended with outward prosperity and inward peace, and spent in doing good, is very delightful, and very desirable it is to have it continued; yet it should be remembered this will not be always, that many days of darkness in the grave will come; and after all the whole of a man's life is vanity, as is often inculcated, Ec 11:7,8; and the chapter is closed with an ironic address to young men, designed to show them the folly and danger of sinful courses, to reform them from them, and to put them in mind of a future judgment, Ec 11:9,10.

Footnotes

• [a]. Correction with Tg; MT like the bones