Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Ecclesiastes · About this commentary
God Made Mankind Upright
Ecclesiastes 7:23-29
23 All this I have proved in wisdom. I said, “I will be wise;” but it was far from me. · WEB
A search is reported as having failed, and the passage says explicitly which of its statements is the finding.
Verse 23 records an ambition and its defeat in one line: I said, I will be wise; but it was far from me. Verse 24 explains the distance — that which is, is far off and exceedingly deep — and asks who can find it out?
So the passage opens by announcing that the investigator is out of his depth. Everything that follows is the report of a search, and the grammar keeps saying so: sought, have not found, have not found, and finally I have only found this.
Verse 26 gives what he did find, and it is bitter: the woman whose heart is snares and traps, whose hands are chains. The description is of a particular kind of person rather than a class, and the escape is not cleverness but relationship: whoever pleases God shall escape from her.
Verse 28 is the difficult one, and its own sentence labels it. I have found one man among a thousand, but I have not found a woman among all those. The clause is a negative result, reported inside a search that verse 23 has already declared beyond him, and verse 20 has already said that there is not a righteous man on earth who does good and doesn't sin. If one man in a thousand were being commended, verse 20 would have excluded him too. What the count records is a scarcity, and the tally comes up almost empty on both sides.
And verse 29 states the one positive result, marked off from everything before it: behold, I have only found this: that God made mankind upright; but they search for many inventions.
The word is adam, humanity. Made straight, and busy with alternatives. The chapter that could not find one dependable person ends by saying the fault is not in the making.
held with reason What this mark means