Ecclesiastes - Introduction

It is objected that sensual epicurism seems to be inculcated ( Ecclesiastes 3:12 Ecclesiastes 3:13 Ecclesiastes 3:22 God's present gifts that is taught, as opposed to a murmuring, anxious, avaricious spirit, as is proved by Ecclesiastes 5:18 Ecclesiastes 5:11-15 of levity and folly; a misunderstanding which he guards against in Ecclesiastes 7:2-6 ; 11:9 ; 12:1 teach fatalism and skepticism. But these are words put in the mouth of an objector; or rather, they were the language of Solomon himself during his apostasy, finding an echo in the heart of every sensualist, who wishes to be an unbeliever, and, who, therefore, sees difficulties enough in the world around wherewith to prop up his wilful unbelief. The answer is given ( Ecclesiastes 7:17 Ecclesiastes 7:18 ; Ecclesiastes 9:11 Ecclesiastes 9:12 ; Ecclesiastes 11:1 Ecclesiastes 11:6 ; 12:13 Even if these passages be taken as words of Solomon, they are to be understood as forbidding a self-made "righteousness," which tries to constrain God to grant salvation to imaginary good works and external strictness with which it wearies itself; also, that speculation which tries to fathom all God's inscrutable counsels ( Ecclesiastes 8:17 carefulness about the future forbidden in Matthew 6:25

THE CHIEF GOOD is that the possession of that which makes us happy, is to be sought as the end, for its own sake; whereas, all other things are but means towards it. Philosophers, who made it the great subject of inquiry, restricted it to the present life, treating the eternal as unreal, and only useful to awe the multitude with. But Solomon shows the vanity of all human things (so-called philosophy included) to satisfy the soul, and that heavenly wisdom alone is the chief good. He had taught so when young ( Proverbs 1:20 ; 8:1 Song of Solomon, he had spiritualized the subject in an allegory; and now, after having long personally tried the manifold ways in which the worldly seek to reach happiness, he gives the fruit of his experience in old age.

It is divided into two parts-- Ecclesiastes 1:1-6:10 earthly things; Ecclesiastes 6:10-12:14 Deviations from strict logical methods occur in these divisions, but in the main they are observed. The deviations make it the less stiff and artificial, and the more suited to all capacities. It is in poetry; the hemistichal division is mostly observed, but occasionally not so. The choice of epithets, imagery, inverted order of words, ellipses, parallelism, or, in its absence, similarity of diction, mark versification.