Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Ecclesiastes · About this commentary
Sentence Not Executed Speedily
Ecclesiastes 8:10-17
10 So I saw the wicked buried. Indeed they came also from holiness. They went and were forgotten in the city where they did this. This also is vanity. · WEB
Delay is identified as the mechanism by which wrongdoing spreads, and the moral order is then asserted in the same breath as the evidence against it.
Verse 11 is the most useful sentence in the book about how corruption grows: because sentence against an evil work is not executed speedily, therefore the heart of the sons of men is fully set in them to do evil.
The cause is not permission but latency. Nothing has been approved; the consequence has merely not arrived yet, and the interval is read as a verdict. And the phrase fully set describes a hardening — a disposition settling into place while nothing happens.
That explains something the book keeps reporting without explaining. Wickedness in the seat of justice Ecclesiastes 3:16, oppression with power on the wrong side Ecclesiastes 4:1, officials layered over officials Ecclesiastes 5:8 — all of it grows in the same gap.
Then verses 12 and 13 assert the moral order, and the verb is worth noticing in a book this careful about knowledge: surely I know that it will be better with those who fear God. Not I have seen. Known, and held against what the next verse observes.
Because verse 14 states the contradiction without flinching: righteous men treated according to the work of the wicked, and wicked men according to the work of the righteous. The exchange runs both ways, and it is called vanity.
The two statements are left standing next to each other. What is known and what is seen do not agree, and the book declines to resolve it by discarding either.
Verse 15 supplies the fourth commendation of eating and drinking, and it is the only one introduced with a verb of approval: then I commended mirth.
And verses 16 and 17 close the chapter on the limit: however much a man labors to seek it out, he won't find it — and a wise man who thinks he can won't be able to.
settled What this mark means