Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Ecclesiastes · About this commentary
Whatever Your Hand Finds to Do
Ecclesiastes 9:7-10
7 Go your way—eat your bread with joy, and drink your wine with a merry heart; for God has already accepted your works. · WEB
The last and warmest commendation opens with acceptance already granted, and the urgency behind it is mortality rather than despair.
The fifth commendation is the only one in the imperative, and it is generous where the others were measured: go your way — eat your bread with joy, and drink your wine with a merry heart.
And the clause that licenses it comes first, in the perfect tense: for God has already accepted your works. Not will accept. The approval is prior to the meal, which means the joy is permitted rather than earned. Every earlier commendation credited God as giver Ecclesiastes 2:24 Ecclesiastes 3:13 Ecclesiastes 5:19; this one credits him with having settled the matter in advance.
Verse 8 adds two details that would have read as festival dress: let your garments be always white, and don't let your head lack oil. White clothing and oil belonged to celebration, and the instruction is to wear them always — the feast is to be the ordinary condition.
Verse 9 names the companion: live joyfully with the wife whom you love all the days of your life of vanity. The vapor word is used twice in one verse, and the marriage is set inside it rather than outside. This is not a promise that the days will last. It is an instruction about what to do with days that will not.
Then verse 10, which is the book's strongest imperative: whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might.
The reason attached to it is not encouragement but a deadline: there is no work, nor plan, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in Sheol, where you are going. Four faculties named, all of them the tools this book has been using, and none available there.
So the energy is grounded in the same fact that produced the despair of chapter 2. The difference is direction — the man who looked back over his works found nothing left over, and the man told to work with his might is facing the other way.
settled What this mark means