Ecclesiastes 6:1–12 | World English Bible Classic
1 There is an evil which I have seen under the sun, and it is heavy on men: 2 a man to whom God gives riches, wealth, and honor, so that he lacks nothing for his soul of all that he desires, yet God gives him no power to eat of it, but an alien eats it. This is vanity, and it is an evil disease. 3 If a man fathers a hundred children, and lives many years, so that the days of his years are many, but his soul is not filled with good, and moreover he has no burial, I say that a stillborn child is better than he;
4 for it comes in vanity, and departs in darkness, and its name is covered with darkness. 5 Moreover it has not seen the sun nor known it. This has rest rather than the other. 6 Yes, though he live a thousand years twice told, and yet fails to enjoy good, don’t all go to one place?
7 All the labor of man is for his mouth, and yet the appetite is not filled. 8 For what advantage has the wise more than the fool? What has the poor man, that knows how to walk before the living? 9 Better is the sight of the eyes than the wandering of the desire. This also is vanity and a chasing after wind.
10 Whatever has been, its name was given long ago; and it is known what man is; neither can he contend with him who is mightier than he. 11 For there are many words that create vanity. What does that profit man? 12 For who knows what is good for man in life, all the days of his vain life which he spends like a shadow? For who can tell a man what will be after him under the sun?
The sixth chapter begins with an observed condition: “There is an evil which I have seen under the sun, and it is heavy on men.” The word “evil” identifies a distressing state of affairs. The description that follows explains the affliction: a person possesses abundance but cannot receive its good.
The phrase “under the sun” returns us to the field of inquiry established in the opening chapter. Human beings labor, gain possessions, and live within circumstances they cannot finally control. The Preacher has already described someone who works and then leaves his possessions to another, and someone who accumulates wealth only to lose it through misfortune. Here he describes something different. The wealth need not disappear before the misery begins. It may remain plainly visible while the owner is unable to enjoy it.
The emphasis falls on the division between what the man possesses and what he can experience. His wealth is substantial, yet his life is marked by deprivation. That division governs the examples that follow.
Verse 2 names three advantages: “riches, wealth, and honor.” Riches and wealth describe material abundance; honor adds the public standing that often accompanies success. The man is not merely solvent. He possesses what people spend their lives trying to obtain, and the verse intensifies the picture by saying that he lacks nothing of all he desires. The example deliberately removes the familiar explanation that disappointment results from insufficient resources. He has the resources.
Then the sentence turns: “yet God gives him no power to eat of it, but an alien eats it.” The contrast is not between having a great deal and having a little. It is between having and partaking. “Eat” fits the repeated language of enjoyment in the surrounding chapters. The Preacher is concerned with the capacity to receive the good that possessions can supply, not merely with the physical act of putting food in one's mouth. A person may have the means of provision without being able to enjoy the provision.
God appears on both sides of the contrast. He gives riches, wealth, and honor; he does not give the power to enjoy them. The speaker therefore refuses to treat enjoyment as an automatic product of ownership. The ability to take one's portion is itself dependent upon God. Ecclesiastes 5:19–20 has just described wealth, the power to enjoy it, and satisfaction in labor as divine gifts. Chapter 6 turns that positive statement around and asks us to consider the person who receives one gift without the other. The chapters belong together, and reading them together prevents us from reducing the passage to advice about having a better attitude.
The verse gives no explanation for this withholding. Illness, loss of opportunity, and other circumstances might prevent enjoyment, but the Preacher does not identify a cause here or accuse the man of a particular sin. His claim is that ownership cannot create the capacity to enjoy. That capacity belongs to God’s giving as surely as the possessions do.
The stranger who eats the wealth completes the reversal. What the owner had accumulated becomes another person’s enjoyment. The outsider’s place in the sentence sharpens the contrast between legal or social possession and the actual reception of good.
The verdict is severe: “This is vanity, and it is an evil disease.” The familiar word vanity again marks the frustration of an expectation that cannot be secured. The phrase “evil disease” communicates a grievous affliction, not necessarily a medical diagnosis. We are being asked to recognize something deeply wrong in the human condition: a person can have everything that seemed necessary for a satisfying life and still lack the very experience for which he wanted it.
Verse 3 expands the example beyond possessions. Suppose a man fathers a hundred children and lives many years. In the ancient setting, numerous descendants could signify household strength, continuity, and honor. Long life likewise belonged among the recognizable goods people desired. The Preacher takes these advantages to an extreme so that the reader cannot answer his earlier example by suggesting that the man merely needed a larger family or more time.
But the decisive condition remains: “his soul is not filled with good.” Here “soul” speaks of the person in his appetite and experience. The man has accumulated years and descendants without receiving the good that would make the abundance satisfying. The verse then adds that “he has no burial.” Within a picture of extensive descendants and public standing, the absence of burial is particularly jarring. Even the honor ordinarily expected at the end of life is missing.
The absence of burial completes a series of frustrated expectations. Descendants suggest continuity, long years suggest a full life, and burial ordinarily marks the community’s final recognition of the dead. The imagined man possesses the first two in extraordinary measure and still lacks both satisfaction and a fitting end.
The comparison with a stillborn child is deliberately severe. The Preacher sets a life crowded with years and descendants but empty of satisfaction beside a life that never enters the visible world. His measure in this comparison is rest: the long-lived man has endured the weariness of an unsatisfied life, while the child has not endured those years of frustration.
Verses 4–5 describe the child as coming in vanity, departing in darkness, having a name covered in darkness, and never seeing the sun. The language emphasizes obscurity and the absence of the visible life the prosperous man possessed in abundance. Yet the Preacher says, “This has rest rather than the other.” The comparison turns on rest. The one who possessed much has lived without the good that possession seemed to promise. The one who never possessed those things has not endured the same prolonged frustration.
Job 3:11–19 provides a related biblical expression of grief. Job, overwhelmed by suffering, asks why he did not die at birth and imagines the grave as a place where the weary rest and the oppressed are no longer driven by their oppressors. Job's words are the speech of a suffering man, not a general command to prefer death. Ecclesiastes similarly uses a severe comparison to expose the poverty of measuring a life only by its length and outward abundance.
Verse 6 makes the imagined lifespan almost absurdly large: two thousand years. The point is not to calculate a plausible human age but to press the argument to its limit. Even if a person lived that long, without enjoying good the increase in years would not solve the central problem. The question “don’t all go to one place?” then places both figures before the shared destination of death. Duration does not grant an exemption. The man with more years and more descendants cannot make those quantities answer the question of whether his life has been good.
The comparison exposes the inadequacy of counting a life by its outward measures. Riches, honor, descendants, and even two thousand years can be counted, but the enjoyment of good cannot be established by adding more of them. The man’s extraordinary lifespan only prolongs the contrast between what he has received and what he has been unable to enjoy.
Verse 7 moves from an extraordinary wealthy man to a universal observation: “All the labor of man is for his mouth, and yet the appetite is not filled.” The mouth represents the ordinary need that labor sustains. People work so they can eat; they eat and must work and eat again. The cycle is not imaginary. Food genuinely sustains life, and work genuinely obtains it. But satisfying today's need does not bring the whole business of needing to an end.
The second half of the verse broadens the observation through appetite. The term rendered “appetite” can refer to the desiring person or life, not only a stomach that needs calories. The man eats, yet the need returns. The observation connects the bodily rhythm of provision with the larger restless desire that the chapter has exposed. Accumulation does not necessarily end wanting, and the ability to obtain a thing does not guarantee that obtaining it will settle the person who wants it.
The verse carries the chapter’s earlier concern into the rhythm of ordinary existence. The wealthy man could not enjoy his abundance; every laborer, wealthy or poor, must continually return to the needs that labor serves. Appetite makes dependence an everyday experience.
Verse 8 returns to the book’s question about advantage: “For what advantage has the wise more than the fool?” The word “advantage” recalls the opening inquiry into what profit human effort yields. Wisdom helps a person judge and act within life, but the recurring appetite of verse 7 belongs to wise and foolish alike. Both must labor for their needs; neither can secure enjoyment or escape death through understanding. The question presses beyond the usefulness of a wise decision to ask what lasting advantage wisdom can obtain under these conditions.
The second question concerns “the poor man, that knows how to walk before the living.” The wording is difficult, but the basic picture is of a poor person who knows how to conduct himself among others. Skill in living, social judgment, and practical knowledge are genuine resources even when material resources are scarce. Still, that competence does not remove the poor man's creaturely limitations. He, too, must eat, desire, labor, and eventually die.
The questions place wisdom and practical competence under the same measure used for wealth and longevity. Both can improve how a person lives, but neither ends the recurring need of verse 7. The advantage under examination is therefore larger than a particular wise decision: it concerns whether wisdom can lift a person beyond the conditions common to human life.
Verse 9 offers a comparison: “Better is the sight of the eyes than the wandering of the desire.” Verse 8 has asked what wisdom and practical skill can gain for people who remain subject to appetite. The answer turns attention from what a person might yet obtain to what is already before his eyes. The sight of the eyes concerns an available good; wandering desire travels beyond it toward possibilities that may never be possessed or enjoyed.
The word “better” makes a genuine comparison. A present good can be seen, received, and enjoyed. Desire that continually wanders keeps moving its object farther away, so that the person remains occupied with wanting even while something good is at hand. The contrast develops verse 7: the mouth may be fed while longing continues to search for another satisfaction.
The wealthy man at the chapter’s opening had abundance without enjoyment. Here the Preacher shows another way the distance between possession and enjoyment appears: desire can carry a person away from the good actually available to him.
“This also is vanity and a chasing after wind” places even this better choice within the chapter’s larger judgment. Receiving a present good is meaningful, but the restless pursuit of ever more remains elusive. The image of chasing wind recalls the futility of trying to secure through desire what human life cannot finally hold.
Verse 10 turns from appetite and enjoyment to the conditions under which human beings exist: “Whatever has been, its name was given long ago; and it is known what man is; neither can he contend with him who is mightier than he.” The verse speaks of a reality already named and a human nature already known. Naming expresses an established condition; the man whose appetite ranges outward still lives within a nature and world he did not establish.
The language of man invites a comparison with Adam in Genesis. The Hebrew term adam can refer to humanity, and Genesis portrays the man as formed from the ground and given life by God (Genesis 2:7). Ecclesiastes uses that creaturely perspective to sharpen the point: a human being can name, labor, accumulate, and reason, but remains the kind of being whose life and capacities are received. The wording in Ecclesiastes does not require a direct quotation of Genesis for that relationship to illuminate the argument.
The one “mightier than he” is most naturally understood as God in this setting. God has repeatedly appeared as the giver of possessions, enjoyment, and the conditions of human life. The contrast is between the human creature and the One whose power exceeds his. The man who cannot ensure his own enjoyment cannot overcome that inequality by contention.
The verb “contend” brings the language of dispute into the chapter. A person may argue about the terms of his life, but argument does not change the fundamental difference between the one who receives life and the One who gives it. The question of advantage has now reached beyond possessions and wisdom to the limits of human power itself.
Verse 11 continues: “For there are many words that create vanity. What does that profit man?” The question returns once more to gain. Words can multiply without changing the conditions being described. The Preacher has spent the chapter examining the insufficiency of abundance, duration, and skill; now he adds the insufficiency of speech when speech pretends to supply mastery.
Speech can describe a condition, protest it, or attempt to justify a different outcome; its abundance cannot by itself change that condition. The language continues the contention of verse 10: words become futile when they are made to carry a power they do not possess.
The closing question deliberately echoes the opening concern of the book. What profit has a person gained? The answer cannot be established by the quantity of his possessions, the number of his years, or the volume of his arguments.
Verse 12 closes with two questions: “For who knows what is good for man in life, all the days of his vain life which he spends like a shadow? For who can tell a man what will be after him under the sun?” The first question concerns the full course of a life. People recognize particular goods, but they cannot see the whole course of their days and determine in advance which circumstances will ultimately serve them well.
The description “like a shadow” recalls the brevity and elusiveness expressed by vanity. A shadow is real and visible, yet it moves and disappears. The comparison places human judgments about the good within the limited days available to make them. A person may desire an outcome without knowing all that it will bring, or reject a circumstance without seeing what may follow it. Human knowledge is partial even when human choices matter.
The final question reaches beyond the person’s life: who can tell him what will come afterward? The Preacher has already observed that a worker must leave the results of labor to someone else. He now asks about the larger future that remains hidden from the one who works. Wealth does not purchase knowledge of that future. Wisdom does not turn the years after death into a possession. The man cannot supervise the whole story from beginning to end.