Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Ecclesiastes · About this commentary
One Event Happens to Both
Ecclesiastes 2:12-17
12 I turned myself to consider wisdom, madness, and folly; for what can the king’s successor do? Just that which has been done long ago. · WEB
Wisdom's superiority is affirmed and then shown to make no difference to the one thing that ends the argument.
Verse 12 turns from the inventory back to the categories — wisdom, madness, and folly — with the observation that a successor can only redo that which has been done long ago.
Verse 13 then states a conclusion the book never retracts: wisdom excels folly, as far as light excels darkness. A reader who takes this book as a case against wisdom has to get past it.
Verse 14 gives the wise man's advantage concretely — the wise man's eyes are in his head, and the fool walks in darkness — and then the sentence turns on a single conjunction: and yet I perceived that one event happens to them all.
The event is death. What the observation does is not deny wisdom's value but limit its jurisdiction. Wisdom is better at everything except the last thing, and the last thing is not optional.
Verse 15 records the personal consequence as a question he asks himself: as it happens to the fool, so will it happen even to me; and why was I then more wise? The pronoun matters. This is not a general observation about mortality; it is a man discovering that his best asset does not cover the largest liability.
Verse 16 adds the second erasure, which is memory. Of the wise man, even as of the fool, there is no memory forever — the finding of chapter 1 Ecclesiastes 1:11, now applied to the observer. And the closing clause is unadorned: the wise man must die just like the fool.
Verse 17 gives the emotional result unsoftened: so I hated life. The hatred is recorded as a finding, and seven verses later a commendation of eating and drinking as God's gift is set beside it Ecclesiastes 2:24. Both stand.
settled What this mark means