Ecclesiastes 7 Footnotes

7:26 Solomon wrote here out of his bitter personal experience with marriage. As a Near Eastern potentate he had a large harem, and his foreign wives led him astray (1Kg 11:4). He was not a hater of women, but realized that an unwise marriage can become a trap. Like most Israelite Wisdom literature, Ecclesiastes was written for a male audience of educated elite, young men being trained for government service. Solomon viewed marriage from that perspective. Had the book been written for women, it would have spoken of the misery of the woman married to a cruel and brutal man. Much of Ecclesiastes is taken up with reflections on Gn 3, the account of the first sin, which is one reason that the book is so concerned with death and the brevity of life (Gn 3:19). It was the woman’s being deceived—in which her husband, standing by (“with her,” Gn 3:6), failed to intervene—that brought sin to the human scene, a condition in which all people now participate (Ec 7:20-29). In effect, Solomon urged his readers not to repeat Adam’s mistake. But he was not devaluing marriage as such; indeed, a good, lifelong marriage is one of the great joys of life (9:9).