Commentaries and Other Bible Study Helps - Prayer Tents - Prayer Tents

3:16-17 The effects of the fall extend to human relationships (cf. Genesis 4), and thus in a fallen world one suffers outright injustice and wickedness at the hand of other human beings. What makes this sad reality tolerable is the certainty that God will judge the righteous and the wicked, i.e., ultimately justice will be done.

3:18-19 The children of man . . . are but beasts in the sense that both human beings and animals die (vv. 19-21). In terms of mortality, then, man has no advantage over the beasts.

3:21 Who knows whether the spirit of man goes upward. For the Preacher, the human spirit is a mysterious entity: while he affirms that the spirit returns to God when a person dies (12:7), he does not know how it comes to reside in the human body in the first place (11:5). In this verse the verb "know" has either the sense of "to comprehend, to understand completely" (as in, e.g., 1:17; 7:25; 8:16) or else "to perceive, to observe" (as in 2:14; 3:12, 14).

4:2-3 Some people's circumstances are so tragic that they even welcome death. The Preacher, however, considers those who have not yet lived or died to be even more fortunate than those who die in such misery, thus indicating that he would still consider death to be an "enemy" (1 Cor. 15:26), despite its ability to provide relief from earthly suffering.