Ecclesiastes 7 Footnotes

7:16-17 The text explicitly tells us not to be “excessively righteous” or “overly wise,” just as it tells us not to be “excessively wicked.” This would seem to say that a little wickedness and folly are acceptable, and even preferable. Ecclesiastes is concerned with the wise man’s efforts to gain control of life. Diligence is generally rewarded with prosperity and health, whereas those who are carefree or careless can quickly lose both. But the quest for prudence can go too far; a severely austere life can be joyless. By the same token, turning away from the constraints of a disciplined life can bring trouble—even premature death. No one can avoid sinning to some degree in this life; it is part of our human condition (v. 20; Rm 3:23), but the wise person will avoid such foolishness where possible, and the carrying of supposedly prudent behavior to a ridiculous extreme. The discussion here is not about God’s final judgment upon our lives, but about our daily conduct; in typical wisdom style the writer played one pole of behavior against another. If part of the book’s advice here seems to question what Jesus would later say about the need to “be perfect” (Mt 5:48), it is well to recall how Jesus illustrated that perfection in even-handed treatment of others reflected God’s love for all people. Nothing Ecclesiastes says in these verses contradicts that teaching; if anything, in its balanced approach to living, it reinforces it.

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).