Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Ecclesiastes · About this commentary
The Dead Know Nothing
Ecclesiastes 9:1-6
1 For all this I laid to my heart, even to explore all this: that the righteous, and the wise, and their works, are in the hand of God; whether it is love or hatred, man doesn’t know it; all is before them. · WEB
The one advantage the living are granted is knowing they will die, and the statements about the dead are bounded by the phrase the book has used throughout.
Verse 2 lays out the leveling in pairs: one event to the righteous and to the wicked; to the good, to the clean, to the unclean, to him who sacrifices, and to him who doesn't sacrifice. Ritual standing, moral standing, and religious practice are all listed, and none of them changes the outcome.
Verse 3 calls this an evil, which is the book's honesty about it. The leveling is not presented as fitting.
Then verse 4 reverses the judgment of chapter 4. There the dead were praised above the living and the unborn above both Ecclesiastes 4:2–3; here a living dog is better than a dead lion, and the ground is one word: hope. The dog is the despised animal and the lion the noble one, and being alive outweighs the difference.
Verse 5 states the asymmetry that makes the hope possible, and it is a strange advantage: the living know that they will die, but the dead don't know anything. Awareness of the end is the whole superiority claimed. Everything the book recommends — eating, drinking, working with your might, enjoying a wife — depends on that knowledge, because a person who does not know his time is running out has no reason to spend it well.
And the description of the dead is plain: no knowledge, no reward, memory forgotten, and their love, their hatred, and their envy has perished long ago.
Verse 6 adds the qualifier that fixes the scope, and it is the phrase the book has used from its third verse. The dead have no portion in anything that is done under the sun. What is described is their relation to this order — the one the investigation can see. The book's own answer to death lies outside that horizon, in a judgment it states twice Ecclesiastes 11:9 Ecclesiastes 12:14, and the two do not compete.
settled What this mark means