1. Cast thy bread upon the waters] The book, as it draws nearer to its close, becomes more and more enigmatic, and each single verse is as a parable and dark saying. It is not to be wondered at, in such a case, that interpreters should, after their nature, read their own thoughts between the lines and so “find what they have sought.” This precept accordingly has been taken by some commentators (e.g. Grätz) as recommending an unrestrained licentiousness. By others it has been raised almost to the level of the counsel which bids us “do good, hoping for nothing again, even to the unthankful and the evil” (Matthew 5:44-46; Luke 6:32-35). The latter is, it need hardly be said, infinitely more in accordance with the context and with the conclusion to which the writer is drawing near. Here again we find guidance in the parallelism of Greek thought. As Lowth pointed out (De Sac. Poes. Heb. x.) the words refer to the Greek proverbial phrase σπείρειν ἐπὶ πόντῳ (“to sow in the ocean”) as indicating a thankless labour. So Theognis, v. 105,

Δειλοὺς δʼ εὖ ἔρδοντι ματαιοτάτη χάρις ἔστιν,

Ἴσον γὰρ σπείρειν πόντον ἀλὸς πολιῆς.

Οὔτε γὰρ ἄν πόντον σπείοων βαθὺ λήϊον ἀμῶς,

Οὔτε κακοὺς εὖ δρῶν εὖ πάλιν ἀντιλάβοις.

“Vain is thy bounty, giving to the base,

Like scattering seed upon the salt sea’s plain;

Sowing the sea, thou shalt no harvest reap,

Nor, giving to the vile, reward shalt gain.”

Other parallels are found (1) in the Aramaic version of the proverbs of Sirach “Cast thy bread upon the water and the land, and at last thou shalt find it again” (Dukes, Rabbin. Blumenl. p. 73). (2) In an Arabic proverb, the moral of a long legend narrating how Mohammed the son of Hassan had been in the daily habit of throwing loaves into a river, how the life of an adopted son of the Caliph Mutewekjil, who had narrowly escaped drowning by clambering to a rock, was thus preserved, and how Mohammed saw in this a proof of the proverb he had learnt in his youth “Do good; cast thy bread upon the waters, and one day thou shall be rewarded” (Diez, Denkwürdigkeiten von Asien, i. p. 106, quoted by Dukes, ut supra). (3) In a Turkish proverb, also quoted by Dukes from Diez, “Do good, cast thy bread upon the water. If the fish know it not, yet the Creator knows.”

The writer holds himself aloof from the selfish prudence of the maxim of Theognis, and bids men not to be afraid “to cast their bread (the generic term stands for “corn,” as in Genesis 41:54; Isaiah 28:28) even upon the face of the thankless waters.” Sooner or later they shall reap as they have sown. Comp. 2 Corinthians 9:6-10. It is not without interest to note that this interpretation is adopted by Voltaire in his Précis de l’Ecclesiaste,

“Répandez vos bienfaits avec magnificence,

Même aux moins vertueux ne les refusez pas.”

Other interpretations may be briefly noted, but have not much to commend them: (1) that the figure is drawn from agriculture, and that the corn is to be sown in a well irrigated field, but this gives a meaning precisely the opposite of the true one; (2) that it is drawn from commerce and commends a venturous spirit of enterprise like that of exporting corn, which is certain to bring profit in the long run; but this again, unless we make the venture one of benevolence, is foreign to the spirit of the context; (3) that it speaks of throwing cakes of bread upon the water, that float away and seem to be wasted; but this, though leading to the same result as the interpretation here adopted, and having the support of the Arab legend quoted above, lacks the point of the reference to the Greek proverb; (4) last and basest, the imagination of one interpreter mentioned above that the precept sanctions a boundless sensual indulgence.

2. Give a portion to seven, and also to eight] The precept is clearly a pendant to Ecclesiastes 11:1 and has received the same variety of interpretations. Following the same line of thought as before, we find in it the counsel to give freely as opportunities present themselves. The combination of “to seven and also to eight,” is, like that of “six and seven” in Job 5:19, of “three and four” in Amos 1, 2, like the “seventy times seven” of Matthew 18:22, a Hebrew form of the definite for the indefinite. There is, in our acts of kindness, to be no grudging narrowness. In such things

“Kind heaven disdains the lore

Of nicely calculated less or more.”

And the reason given fits in with the counsel, “Thou knowest not what evil shall be on earth.” “Hard times may come, when thou shalt have no means for giving; therefore waste not the present opportunity. Help those to whom thou givest to meet the hazards of the uncertain future.” Here again men interpret according to their character, and so, we have, as before, the licentious moralist finding a plea for unlimited voluptuousness, while the prudential adviser sees in the precept, which he renders “Divide the portion into seven, yea eight parts,” a caution like that which led Jacob to divide his caravan into two portions for the sake of safety (Genesis 32:7-8). Taken in this last sense the precept stands on a level with the current saying of the Stock Exchange that it isn’t wise to “put all your eggs into one basket,” with the “hedging” of those who bet on more than one horse at the Derby and other races. It may well be left to the student to decide which of these interpretations has most to commend it.

It may be admitted, however, as it is the enigmatic form of the precept which has given rise to these discordant views as to its meaning, that the grave irony of the writer, which we have already traced in ch. Ecclesiastes 10:4; Ecclesiastes 10:20 may have led him to adopt that form because it served as a test of character, each scholar finding what he sought. Here also it might be added “Who hath ears to hear, let him hear” (Matthew 13:9).

3. If the clouds be full of rain] The thought is linked to that which precedes it by the mention of the “evil coming upon the earth.” In regard to that evil, the sweeping calamities that lie beyond man’s control, he is as powerless as he is when the black clouds gather and the winds rush wildly. He knows only that the clouds will pour down their rain, that the tree will lie as the tempest has blown it down. Is he therefore to pause, and hesitate and stand still, indulging the temper

“over exquisite

To cast the fashion of uncertain evils”?

That question is answered in the next verse. It may be noted, as an illustration of the way in which the after-thoughts of theology have worked their way into the interpretation of Scripture, that the latter clause has been expounded as meaning that the state in which men chance to be when death comes on them is unalterable, that there is “no repentance in the grave.” So far as it expresses the general truth that our efforts to alter the character of others for the better must cease when the man dies, that when the tree falls to south or north, towards the region of light or that of darkness, we, who are still on earth, cannot prune, or dig about, or dung it (Luke 13:8), the inference may be legitimate enough, but it is clear that it is not that thought which was prominent in the mind of the writer.

4. He that observeth the wind shall not sow] This is, as has been said above, the answer to the question suggested in Ecclesiastes 11:3. Our ignorance of the future is not to put a stop to action. If we allowed that “taking thought for the morrow” (Matthew 6:25) to hinder us from doing good, we should be as the husbandman who is always observing the clouds and lets the time of sowing pass by; who when harvest comes, watches the wind as it blows round him, till “the harvest is past, and the summer ended” (Jeremiah 8:20) and he can no longer reap. The very watching for opportunities may end in missing them. There are times when it is our wisdom to “be instant out of season” (2 Timothy 4:2).

5. As thou knowest not what is the way of the spirit] The Hebrew word for “spirit” has also the meaning of “wind” as in the verse immediately preceding, and this has led many commentators (as with the corresponding Greek word in John 3:8) to prefer that meaning, here. Two different examples of man’s ignorance of the processes of the common phenomena of nature are adduced on this view as analogous to his ignorance of the “work of God,” of what we call the Divine Government of the Universe. It may be questioned however whether, both here and in John 3:8, a more adequate meaning is not given by retaining the idea of “spirit” as the “breath of life” of Genesis 2:7. The growth of the human embryo was for the early observers of nature an impenetrable mystery (Job 10:11; Psalm 139:13-17). It became yet more mysterious when men thought of life, with all its phenomena of sensation and consciousness entering into the material structure thus “fearfully and wonderfully made.” This sense of the word agrees it will be seen, with its use in chaps. Ecclesiastes 3:21, Ecclesiastes 12:7. The word “nor” has nothing answering to it in the Hebrew and the sentence should run thus, describing not two distinct phenomena but one complex fact, “as thou knowest not the way of the spirit (the breath of life) how the framework of the body (literally the bones, but the word is used commonly for the whole body as in Lamentations 4:7; Job 7:15; Proverbs 15:30; Proverbs 16:24 and elsewhere) is in the womb of her that is with child.

the works of God who maketh all] So in ch. Ecclesiastes 7:13, we had “Consider the work of God.” Here the addition of “who maketh all” indicates a higher stage of faith. That “never-failing Providence orders all things both in heaven and earth.” The agnosticism of the Debater is, like that of Hooker (Eccl. Pol. i. 2. § 3), the utterance of a devout Theism, content to keep within the limits of the Knowable, but not placing the object of its adoration in the category of the Unknown and Unknowable.

6. In the morning sow thy seed] Once again the enigmatic form, as in Ecclesiastes 11:2, is the touchstone of interpreters. It has been held to mean (1) that men are to seek sensual pleasures not in the morning of their youth only, but in the eventide of age, not to be afraid of begetting children, in or out of wedlock, in any period of their life; or (2) that man is to work, as we say, early and late, doing his appointed task, regardless of the chances of life; or (3) with a more specific application of the same general principle, that he is to sow the seed of good and kindly deeds, and wait for the harvest, the prospect of which is hidden from him. Of these (3) seems every way the truest and most satisfying interpretation. In “withdraw not thy hand,” and in the use of the two demonstrative pronouns (in the Hebrew, however, the same pronoun is repeated, this or this), we have a parallel to the thought and language of ch. Ecclesiastes 7:18. The whole precept is a call to activity in good, not unlike that of Him who said “I must work the works of Him that sent me, while it is called to day: the night cometh, when no man can work” (John 9:4); who taught men to labour in the vineyard, even though they were not called to begin their work till the eleventh hour when it was “toward evening, and the day far spent” (Matthew 20:1-16).

thou knowest not whether shall prosper] The ignorance of men as to the results of their labour, still more the apparent or the actual failure of their earlier efforts, tempts them too often to despondency and indolence. The maxim, like that of Ecclesiastes 11:6, bids them take comfort from that very ignorance. The seed sown in the morning of life may bear its harvest at once, or not till the evening of age. The man may reap at one and the same time the fruits of his earlier and his later sowing, and may find that “both are alike good.”

7. Truly the light is sweet] Better, And the light is sweet. The conjunction is simply the usual copulative particle. The word for “sweet” is that used of honey in Jdg 14:14; of the honeycomb in Proverbs 24:13. The pessimism of the thinker is passing away under the sunshine of the wiser plan of life in which he al last finds guidance. Life may after all, rightly ordered, be pleasant and comely, not without the “sweetness and light” on which the modern preachers of wisdom lay stress. A remarkable parallel to the form of the maxim (quoted by Ginsburg) is found in Euripides:

Μή μʼ ἀπολέσης ἄωρον• ἡδὺ γὰρ τὸ φῶς

λεύσσειν, τὰ δʼ ὑπὸ γῆν μὴ μʼ ἰδεῖν ἀναγκάσῃς.

“Destroy me not before my youth is ripe:

For pleasant sure it is to see the sun;

Compel me not to see what lies below.”

Iphig. in Aul. 1219.

So Theognis contemplating death:

κείσομαι ὥστε λίθος

ἄφθογγος, λείψω δʼ ἐρατὸν φάος ἠελίοιο.

“Then shall I lie, as voiceless as a stone,

And see no more the loved light of the sun.”

The use of the phrase “seeing the sun” for living, may be noted as essentially Hellenic in its tone. So we have again “seeing the light of the sun” for “living” in Eurip. Hippol. 4.

8. But if a man live many years …] Better, For if a man … The relation is one of connexion rather than contrast. In the calm, enjoyable because beneficent, life which the thinker now contemplates as within his reach, the remembrance of the darkness which lies beyond is to be a motive, not for a fretful pessimism, but for a deliberate effort to enjoy rightly. The figure of a corpse which was carried about in the banquets of the Egyptians was intended not to destroy or damp the joy, but to make it more lasting by making it more controlled (Herod. ii. 78). The teaching now is something more than the “Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die” of the sensualist (Wis 2:1-6; 1 Corinthians 15:32). “Respice finem; Memento mori,” these rules teach us to use life wisely and therefore well.

let him remember the days of darkness] These are clearly not the days of sorrow or adversity (though the phrase as such might admit that meaning), but those of the darkness which is contrasted with the light of the sun, with the light of life, the land that lies behind the veil, in the unseen world of Hades or of Sheol, the darkness of the valley of the shadow of death. As the Greeks spoke of the dead as οἱ πλείονες “the many,” so does the writer speak of the days after death as “many.” The night will be long and dreary, therefore it is well to make the most of the day. The teaching of the whole verse finds, as might be expected, an echo in that of the Epicurean poet, when he greets his friend on the return of spring, but the echo is in a lower key.

Nunc decet aut viridi nitidum caput impedire myrto

Aut flore, terræ quem ferunt solutæ,

Pallida Mors æquo pulsat pede pauperum tabernas

Regumque turres. O beate Sexti,

Vitæ summa brevis spem nos vetat inchoare longam,

Jam te premet nox, fabulæque Manes

Et domus exilis Plutonia.

“Now is it meet to crown bright brow

With wreaths of fresh green myrtle; now.

With flowers that owe their timely birth

To spring’s soft influence o’er the earth.

With equal foot the pauper’s cell

Death visits, and where emperors dwell,

Wherefore my Sextus, good and dear,

Life’s little span forbids us here

To start, if we indeed are wise,

On some far-reaching enterprise:

Soon Night and fabled forms of dread,

Where Pluto lords it o’er the dead,

Shall meet thee in thy narrow bed.”

Hor. Od. i. 4.

All that cometh is vanity] There is a significance in the new form of the burden of the Debater’s song. The sentence of “vanity,” i.e. of shadowy transitoriness, is passed not only on the years in which he is, in a measure, capable of enjoyment, and on the days of darkness, but even on that which lies beyond them. The unknown future—the undiscovered country—it was, from the point of view from which, for the time, he looked at it, “vanity” to build too much even on that. Men speculated much and knew but little, and there was an unreality in sacrificing the present to that undefined future. What has been called “other-worldliness,” involving the contempt at once of the duties and enjoyments of this world, was but a form of unwisdom. Asceticism, looking to that other world, needed to be balanced by the better form of Epicureanism.

9. Rejoice, O young man, in thy youth] Strictly speaking, as the beginning of the end, the opening of the finale of the book, these should be read in close connexion with chap. 12. The Debater turns with his closing counsel to the young. That counsel, like the rest of the book, has been very variously interpreted. (1) Men have seen in it the stern irony of the ascetic, killing the power of rejoicing in the very act of bidding men rejoice, holding before the young man the terrors of the Lord, the fires of Gehenna. Coarsely paraphrased, the counsel so given is practically this, “Follow your desires, take your fling, sow your wild oats, go forth on the voyage of life, ‘youth at the prow and pleasure at the helm,’ but know that all this, the ‘primrose path of dalliance,’ ends in Hell and its eternal fires.” It is not without significance, from this point of view, that the counsel given is almost in direct contradiction to the words of the Law, brought, we may believe, into notice by the growing stress laid on the use of phylacteries, on which those words were written, which warned men that they should not “seek after their own heart and their own eyes” (Numbers 15:39). (2) Men have also seen in it the unchastened counsel of the lowest form of Epicureanism, “Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die. Leave no desire ungratified, seek the maximum of intense enjoyment, crowd the sensations of a life-time into a few short years.” (3) Even the closing words have, by a strange ingenuity, been turned into a protest against asceticism. “God will judge you, if you slight His gifts. Self-denial is for Him no acceptable service. He rejoices in your joy, will punish the gloomy Pharisee or Essene who mortifies the flesh, by leaving him to his self-inflicted tortures.” Once again men have looked at the shield on its gold or its silver side: and the Truth is found in seeing it on both. Once again we may recognise the method of one who spoke φωνήεντα συνέτοισιν (“full of meaning to those who have eyes to see”), and uttered his precepts with a double sense as a test of the character of those who heard or read them. The true purport of the words seems to be as follows. After the manner of chs. Ecclesiastes 2:24, Ecclesiastes 3:12; Ecclesiastes 3:22, Ecclesiastes 5:18, Ecclesiastes 9:7, the Debater falls back on the fact that life is after all worth living, that it is wise to cultivate the faculty of enjoyment in the season when that faculty is, in most cases, as by a law of nature, strong and capable of being fashioned into a habit. So moralists in our own time, preachers of “sweetness and light,” have contrasted the gloomy plodding Philistinism or Puritanism of the English as a people, “qui s’amusent moult (= bien) tristement” (Froissart), with the brightness and gaiety of the French, and have urged us to learn wisdom from the comparison. In good faith he tells the young man to “rejoice in his youth,” to study the bent of his character, what we should call his æsthetic tastes, but all this is not to be the reckless indulgence of each sensuous impulse, but to be subject to the thought “God will bring thee into judgment.” What the judgment may be the Debater does not define. It may come in the physical suffering, the disease, or the poverty, or the shame, that are the portion of the drunkard and the sensualist. It may come in the pangs of self-reproach, and the memory of the “mala mentis gaudia.” “The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices make whips to scourge us.” It is singularly significant to find an echo of the precept so given in the teaching of the great Poet of the more atheistic type of Epicureanism, obliged, as in spite of himself, to recognise the fact of a moral order in the world:

“Inde metus maculat pœnarum præmia vitæ.

Circumretit enim vis atque injuria quemque,

Atque, unde exorta est, ad eum plerumque revertit;

Nec facile est placidam ac pacatam degere vitam,

Qui violat facteis communia fœdera pacis.

Etsi fallit enim divom genus humanumque,

Perpetuo tamen id fore clam diffidere debet.”

“Hence fear of vengeance life’s best prizes mars;

For violence and wrong take him who works them,

As in a net, and to their source return.

Nor is it easy found for him who breaks

By deeds the common covenants of peace

To lead a placid and a peaceful life.

For grant he cheat the gods and all mankind,

He cannot hope the evil done will be

For ever secret.”

Lucr. De Rer. Nat. v. 1151.

Did the judgment of which the thinker speaks go beyond this? That question also has been variously answered. The Debater, it is obvious, does not draw the pictures of the Tartarus and Elysian Fields of the Greek, or of the Gehenna and the Paradise of which his countrymen were learning to speak, it may be, all too lightly. He will not map out a country he has not seen. But the facts on which he dwells, the life of ignoble pleasure, or tyranny, or fraud carried on successfully to the last, the unequal distribution of the pleasures and the pains of life, the obvious retort on the part of the evil-doer that if this life were all, men could take their fill of pleasure and evade the judgment of man, or the misery of self-made reproach and failure, by suicide, all this leads to the conclusion that the “judgment” which the young man is to remember is “exceeding broad,” stretching far into the unseen future of the eternal years. Faith at last comes in where Reason fails, and the man is bidden to remember, in all the flush of life and joy, that “judgment” comes at last, if not in man’s present stage of being, yet in the great hereafter.

10. Therefore remove sorrow from thy heart] The two clauses recognise the two conditions of happiness so far as happiness is attainable by man on earth. “Sorrow,” better perhaps, discontent or vexation, is by a deliberate effort to be put away from our “heart,” i.e. from our mind. We are not to look on the dark side of things, but to cultivate cheerfulness, to be “content” (αὐτάρκης) with whatever life brings us (Php 4:11). And the “flesh” too has its claims which may legitimately be recognised. We need not vex it with the self-inflicted tortures of the ascetic, but, in a sense as far as possible different from “the rehabilitation of the flesh” which has been made the plea for an unrivalled sensuality, consider and meet its capacities for pure and innocent enjoyment.

childhood and youth are vanity] The Hebrew word for “youth” is an unusual one and is not found elsewhere in the Old Testament. It has been differently explained: (1) as the dawn or morning of life, the period of its brightness; and (2) as the time when the hair is black as contrasted with the grey hair of age. Of these (1) seems preferable. The prominent idea of “vanity” here is that of transitoriness. The morning will not last. It is wise to use it while we can.