Ecclesiastes 6:3

"If a man begat an hundred, and lived many years, and the amount of the days of his years was great, and his soul satisfied not itself in good, and also he had no grave, then I say: Better than he is the untimely birth." The accentuation of 3a is like that of 2a. The disjunctives follow the Athnach, as at Kg2 23:13, only that there Telisha Gedhola stands for Pazer. Hitzig finds difficulty with the clause לו ... וגם־, and regards it as a marginal gloss to 5a, taken up into the text at a wrong place. But just the unexpected form and the accidental nature, more than the inward necessity of this feature in the figure, leads us to conclude that the author here connects together historical facts, as conjecturally noted above, into one fanciful picture. מאה is obviously to be supplemented by (ובנות) בנים; the Targ. and Midrash make this man to be Cain, Ahab, Haman, and show at least in this that they extend down into the time of the Persian kingdom a spark of historical intelligence. שׁן רבּ interchanges with שׁן הר, Ecc 11:8, as at Neh 11:30. In order to designate the long life emphatically, the author expresses the years particularly in days: "and if it is much which (Heiligst.: multum est quod) the days of his years amount to;" cf. ימי ויּהיוּ, in Gen 5. With venaphsho there follows the reverse side of this long life with many children: (1) his soul satisfies not itself, i.e., has no self-satisfying enjoyment of the good (min, as at Psa 104:13, etc.), i.e., of all the good things which he possesses, - in a word, he is not happy in his life; and (2) an honourable burial is not granted to him, but קב חם, Jer 22:19, which is the contrary of a burial such as becomes a man (the body of Artaxerxes Ochus was thrown to the cats); whereupon Elster rightly remarks that in an honourab…

In this chapter, I. The royal preacher goes on further to show the vanity of worldly wealth, when men place their happiness in it and are eager and inordinate in laying it up. Riches, in the hands of a man that is wise and generous, and good for something, but in the hands of a sordid, sneaking, covetous miser, they are good for nothing. 1. He takes an account of the possessions and enjoyments which such a man may have. He has wealth (Ecc 6:2), he has children to inherit it (Ecc 6:3), and lives long (Ecc 6:3, Ecc 6:6). 2. He describes his folly in not taking the comfort of it; he has no power to eat of it, lets strangers devour it, is never filled with good, and at last has no burial (Ecc 6:2, Ecc 6:3). 3. He condemns it as an evil, a common evil, vanity, and a disease (Ecc 6:1, Ecc 6:2). 4. He prefers the condition of a still-born child before the condition of such a one (Ecc 6:3). The still-born child's infelicity is only negative (Ecc 6:4, Ecc 6:5), but that of the covetous worldling is positive; he lives a great while to see himself miserable (Ecc 6:6). 5. He shows the vanity of riches as pertaining only to the body, and giving no satisfaction to the mind (Ecc 6:7, Ecc 6:8), and of those boundless desires with which covetous people vex themselves (Ecc 6:9), which, if they be gratified ever so fully, leave a man but a man still (Ecc 6:10). II. He concludes this discourse of the vanity of the creature with this plain inference from the whole, That it is folly to think of making up a happiness for ourselves in the things of this world (Ecc 6:11, Ecc 6:12). Our satisfaction must be in another life, not in this.

6:3-6 a hundred children and . . . be very old: Such honors as virility and old age amount to nothing if life is not enjoyable or does not end well (a decent burial). The darkness of being born dead is preferable to a discontented life.