itself; if he does, the few good men he has met must apparently have been hermits! But though not essentially immoral, the inventive or contriving faculty (so wonderful to Sophocles) seems to Koheleth the chief source of moral danger.
But are these the only results of Koheleth's wide induction from the facts of contemporary life? Yes; a time such as this 'when man rules over man to his hurt' (viii. 9) suggests, not only prudential maxims, but this sad conclusion, already (vii. 15) mentioned by anticipation, that the fate proper to the wicked falls upon the righteous, and that proper to the righteous on the wicked (viii. 14), or to express this in the concrete,
And in accordance with this I have seen ungodly men honoured,
and that too in the holy place (i.e. the temple; comp. Isa. xviii. 7);
but those who had acted rightly had to depart and were forgotten in
the city. This too is vanity[1] (viii. 10).
No wonder that wickedness is rampant! It requires singular
courage to do right when Nemesis delays her visit; or, as
Koheleth puts it, in language which sorely displeased a later
editor,
Because sentence against a wicked work is not executed speedily,
therefore men have abundant courage to do evil. For I know that it
even happens that a sinner does evil for a long time, and yet lives long,
whilst he who fears before God is short-lived as a shadow[1] (viii. 12, 13).
Koheleth does not, of course, include himself among the reckless
evil-doers. He acquiesces in the painful inconsistencies
of the world, and seems to comfort himself with the relatively
best good—'to eat and drink and be merry' (viii. 15). Charity
may perhaps suggest that this is not said without bitter
irony.
Then follows a clumsy but affecting passage (viii. 16, 17) on the uselessness of brooding (as the author had so long
- ↑ Following Bickell. In viii. 10 it is the linguistic form, and in viii. 12, 13 the contents of the Massoretic text which excite suspicion. The former verse is thus rendered by Delitzsch, 'And then I have seen the wicked buried, and they entered into (their 'perpetual house,' the grave): but they that had done right had to depart (into exile) from the holy place (Jerusalem; cf. II. Isa. xlviii. 2), and were forgotten out of the city: this too is vanity.'
