Ecclesiastes 6
The chapter just before this one closed on something warm. After all the Preacher's hard looking at wealth and its disappointments, he landed on a gift: the person to whom God hath given riches and wealth, and hath given him power to eat thereof, and to take his portion, and to rejoice in his labour; this is the gift of God (5:19). The ability to enjoy what you have, he said, is not automatic - it is a gift. Ecclesiastes 6 turns that picture over and shows the same scene with the gift withheld. Here is a man with the identical list - riches, wealth, honour, nothing his soul desires left wanting - and the one thing missing is the very thing the other man was given: yet God giveth him not power to eat thereof (v. 2). The table is full; the man cannot taste it. And the Preacher does not call this a minor disappointment. He calls it vanity, and worse - an evil disease.3
From that one case the chapter widens into the ache lying beneath it. The Preacher pushes the picture to its grim extreme - a man with a hundred children and a thousand years twice over, who never once sees good - and says a stillborn child is better off than he, because at least the child finds rest (vv. 3-6). Then he says the thing the whole book has been circling: All the labour of man is for his mouth, and yet the appetite is not filled (v. 7). We work to feed ourselves, and the feeding never finishes. The hunger always returns, and it is plainly more than a hunger of the stomach. Against the endless chase the Preacher sets one piece of hard-won wisdom - Better is the sight of the eyes than the wandering of the desire (v. 9) - better to enjoy what is actually in front of you than to keep roaming after what is not.
The chapter ends by pressing the limits of what a person can even know. Man cannot contend with him that is mightier than he (v. 10); piling up more words and more things only increases the emptiness (v. 11); and life is so short and so dim - a shadow - that we do not finally know what is good for us or what comes after. For who knoweth what is good for man in this life…? for who can tell a man what shall be after him under the sun? (v. 12). It is a question left wide open, and deliberately so. The Preacher has proven, case by case, that nothing under the sun can fill the soul or answer that question. The reader is left holding the hunger and the question together - which is exactly where the rest of Scripture meets them.2
Tap any highlighted phrase to jump to the commentary that unpacks it.
Ecclesiastes 6:1-6Riches, and No Power to Eat Thereof
1There is an evil which I have seen under the sun, and it is common among men: 2A man to whom God hath given riches, wealth, and honour, so that he wanteth nothing for his soul of all that he desireth, yet God giveth him not power to eat thereof, but a stranger eateth it: this is vanity, and it is an evil disease. 3If a man beget an hundred children, and live many years, so that the days of his years be many, and his soul be not filled with good, and also that he have no burial; I say, that an untimely birth is better than he. 4For he cometh in with vanity, and departeth in darkness, and his name shall be covered with darkness. 5Moreover he hath not seen the sun, nor known any thing: this hath more rest than the other. 6Yea, though he live a thousand years twice told, yet hath he seen no good: do not all go to one place?
The Preacher opens by naming a specific evil… under the sun, and one that is common among men (v. 1) - this is not a rare misfortune but a familiar one. Then he describes it: A man to whom God hath given riches, wealth, and honour, so that he wanteth nothing for his soul of all that he desireth (v. 2). Notice how complete the man's good fortune is. He has the wealth, he has the standing, and he lacks nothing he could want. The list is exactly the list of the blessed man at the end of the previous chapter, who was given riches and the power to eat thereof, and to take his portion, and to rejoice in his labour (5:19). Everything matches - except the one decisive thing. Here the man has the goods but is denied the use of them: yet God giveth him not power to eat thereof. And then the cruelest turn: a stranger eateth it. Someone else - not even his own heir, but an outsider - ends up enjoying what he gathered and could not touch. The Preacher does not soften the verdict. He calls it vanity, and then reaches for a stronger word still: an evil disease. The tragedy here is not lack. It is having, and not being able to taste.3
It is worth sitting with the exact shape of the problem, because it is easy to misread. The man is not condemned, and he is not poor. The evil is not that he has riches - the previous chapter called the same riches a gift of God. The evil is the missing capacity to enjoy them: God giveth him not power to eat thereof. The whole weight of the verse falls on power. Enjoyment, the Preacher has been arguing across these chapters, is not something we manufacture by acquiring enough; it is a power that comes to a person as a gift, and where it is absent no quantity of wealth can substitute for it. So this man stands in front of a full table he cannot taste - rich and starving at once. That is why the comparison the rest of the chapter draws is so severe. A bare existence with rest in it turns out to be more bearable than a crowded, prosperous existence with no enjoyment in it at all. The point is not to despise wealth but to expose its limit: it can fill a house and leave the soul empty.
The Preacher now drives the case to a deliberately shocking extreme. He imagines a man with every visible mark of blessing in his world - an hundred children and many years, a long full life with a large family - and yet whose soul be not filled with good, and who, on top of it all, have no burial (v. 3), denied even the dignity of being laid to rest. And he renders a startling verdict: an untimely birth is better than he. A child born without ever living - one who cometh in with vanity, and departeth in darkness, whose name is lost (v. 4), who hath not seen the sun, nor known any thing (v. 5) - that one, the Preacher says, hath more rest than the other. The reasoning is bleak but exact: even doubling the longest life imaginable - a thousand years twice told - profits nothing if in all those years the man hath seen no good (v. 6). And he closes the section with the great leveler: do not all go to one place? Long life and no life arrive at the same destination; the only question that finally separates them is whether there was any good - any rest, any enjoyment, any tasting - along the way. The man who had everything and tasted none of it had, in the end, less than the child who had nothing but rest.1
Ecclesiastes 6:7-9The Appetite Is Not Filled
7All the labour of man is for his mouth, and yet the appetite is not filled. 8For what hath the wise more than the fool? what hath the poor, that knoweth to walk before the living? 9Better is the sight of the eyes than the wandering of the desire: this is also vanity and vexation of spirit.
Now the Preacher names the wound underneath every case he has described: All the labour of man is for his mouth, and yet the appetite is not filled (v. 7). It is one of the most piercing lines in the book. Strip away the wealth and the honour and the long years, and here is what is left of the human condition under the sun: we work, and we work to feed ourselves, and the feeding never finally satisfies. For his mouth - nearly everything a person does, in the end, serves the daily need to be fed and kept alive. And the bitter punchline is that all this ceaseless labour never reaches a point of enough. The appetite is not filled. Eat today, and you are hungry tomorrow; gain the thing you wanted, and the wanting simply relocates to the next thing. The Preacher has put his finger on something every reader knows from the inside: the strange restlessness that survives every satisfaction, the hollow that reappears as soon as it is filled. He is not merely talking about food. He is talking about the whole driving hunger of a life - and confessing that nothing he has tried, in twelve chapters of trying, has ever managed to fill it.
Verse 8 presses the point with two sharp questions: For what hath the wise more than the fool? what hath the poor, that knoweth to walk before the living? If even the appetite of the wisest is never filled, then what advantage does wisdom finally hand its owner over the fool when it comes to this deepest hunger? And what does the poor person gain who has learned to walk before the living - who knows how to conduct himself rightly and skillfully in society? The questions are not a denial that wisdom is good; the book elsewhere insists that it is. They are an honest admission of wisdom's limit. Wisdom can teach a person how to live well among others, how to handle money and time and speech - but it cannot, by itself, fill the soul or guarantee the joy of the one who has it. On this particular front, the front of the unfillable appetite, the wise and the fool stand closer together than the wise might like to think. Both eat; both hunger again; both walk toward the same one place. Wisdom is real, but it is not the cure for the ache - and the Preacher is too honest to pretend it is.3
Against the bottomless appetite the Preacher sets one steadying piece of wisdom: Better is the sight of the eyes than the wandering of the desire (v. 9). The contrast is between two ways of facing life. The sight of the eyes is what is actually present - the good that is here, in hand, able to be seen and enjoyed right now. The wandering of the desire is the restless roaming of a soul that is never where it is, always reaching past what it has toward what it does not. The Preacher says the first is better. Better to receive and enjoy the real, present good in front of you than to spend your days in the perpetual ache of wanting something else, somewhere else. There is deep practical mercy in the counsel: so much misery comes not from having too little but from refusing to be present to what we have, from a desire that wanders off the moment a good is grasped. And yet - and this is the Preacher's unflinching honesty - even this better way he labels vanity and vexation of spirit. Contentment with the present is wiser than restless craving, but it is still life lived under the sun, still bounded by death and limit. The best available wisdom eases the ache; it does not finally answer it. For that, the chapter will have to point beyond itself.
Ecclesiastes 6:10-12Who Knoweth What Is Good for Man?
10That which hath been is named already, and it is known that it is man: neither may he contend with him that is mightier than he. 11Seeing there be many things that increase vanity, what is man the better? 12For who knoweth what is good for man in this life, all the days of his vain life which he spendeth as a shadow? for who can tell a man what shall be after him under the sun?
The chapter's closing movement turns from the ache of the soul to the limits of the mind. That which hath been is named already, and it is known that it is man: neither may he contend with him that is mightier than he (v. 10). The verse is dense, but its drift is clear. Whatever exists has already been named - fixed, assigned its place - and it is well known what man is: a creature, and a small one. From that follows the sober conclusion: man cannot contend with him that is mightier than he. There is One stronger, and the creature is in no position to argue his case against his Maker, to overturn the limits set on him, or to demand that life come out differently than it does. This is not bitterness; it is the same recognition that steadies the book of Job and the Psalms - that the order of things is held by a hand mightier than ours, and wisdom begins in admitting it. The man who rages against his own finitude, who insists he can master life and bend it to fill his appetite, is contending with One he cannot overpower. The Preacher counsels the humbler and truer posture: to know that we are man, and that Another is mightier, and to live inside that truth rather than against it.
Verse 11 lands a quiet blow against one of our favorite cures: Seeing there be many things that increase vanity, what is man the better? The instinct, when life feels empty, is to add - more possessions, more arguments, more words, more activity, more of whatever we think will finally tip the scales toward enough. The Preacher has watched this strategy and reports the result: the many things do not subtract from the emptiness; they increase it. Piling up more only piles up more vanity. What is man the better? - no better at all, and often worse, weighed down by the very abundance he hoped would satisfy him. It is a direct answer to the chapter's opening man, who had every thing and no joy: the problem was never that he lacked enough things, and adding more would not have healed him. The wisdom here cuts against the grain of a whole way of life: the assumption that the next acquisition, the next word, the next addition will close the gap. The Preacher says the gap does not close from that direction. More of what cannot satisfy never adds up to satisfaction.
The chapter ends not with an answer but with two of the most honest questions in Scripture: For who knoweth what is good for man in this life, all the days of his vain life which he spendeth as a shadow? for who can tell a man what shall be after him under the sun? (v. 12). Two great unknowns are confessed here. First, we do not finally know what is good for us - for all our striving after what we think will satisfy, the deepest good for a human life is not something we can be sure we have correctly identified. And second, we do not know what shall be after us - what comes when our brief span is over. Life is named, twice, as fleeting: vain, and lived out as a shadow, here and gone, without weight or permanence under the sun. It is crucial to feel how deliberately the chapter stops here. The Preacher has dismantled every confident claim to know the good and to secure it; he has shown that wealth, wisdom, long life, and accumulation all fail to fill the soul or settle the questions. And then he simply leaves the questions open: who knoweth? who can tell? The honesty is the point. He will not manufacture an answer from under the sun, because he has proven there is none to be found there. The questions are left hanging precisely so that they can be answered from somewhere else - by a wisdom that comes down from above the sun.2
Further study
- The Hebrew text of Ecclesiastes 6 (Koheleth) with Rashi, Ibn Ezra, and other classical commentators side by side - useful for nephesh (v. 7, the “appetite” that is really the soul), for ra'ah (vv. 1-2, the “evil” and “evil disease”), and for the difficult comparison with the untimely birth in verses 3-5.
- Ecclesiastes 6 ↔ John 6 · 1 Corinthians 1 · Colossians 2Intertextual BibleTraces the threads tying Ecclesiastes 6 to the rest of Scripture - the unfilled appetite (v. 7) read alongside I am the bread of life: he that cometh to me shall never hunger (John 6:35), and the chapter's unanswered who knoweth what is good for man? (v. 12) read beside the One in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge (Col. 2:3).
- Ecclesiastes 6 - Translators' NotesNET BibleThe NET Bible's detailed footnotes on Ecclesiastes 6 - the force of “power to eat thereof” in verses 1-2, the harsh comparison with the stillborn child in verses 3-5, the idiom “labour… for his mouth” in verse 7, and the rhetorical questions that close the chapter in verses 10-12.
Where this echoes in Scripture
Riches, and No Power to Eat Thereof
- Ecclesiastes 5:19every man also to whom God hath given riches and wealth, and hath given him power to eat thereof... this is the gift of God.The same man with the gift granted - the bright side of the picture this chapter turns over (v. 2).
- Luke 12:19-20Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years... But God said unto him, Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee.The rich man who stored up everything and a stranger inherited it - the warning of verses 1-2 told as a parable.
- John 6:27Labour not for the meat which perisheth, but for that meat which endureth unto everlasting life.The food that does not perish - answering the full table the man could not taste (v. 2).
- Job 3:11-13Why died I not from the womb?... For now should I have lain still and been quiet, I should have slept: then had I been at rest.The same hard comparison as verses 3-5 - the rest of the one who never suffered set against a life of misery.
- Psalm 49:16-17Be not thou afraid when one is made rich... For when he dieth he shall carry nothing away.The leveler of verse 6 - all, rich and poor alike, go to one place and carry nothing with them.
The Appetite Is Not Filled
- John 6:35I am the bread of life: he that cometh to me shall never hunger; and he that believeth on me shall never thirst.The direct answer to verse 7 - the bread that fills the appetite no labour can fill.
- Isaiah 55:2Wherefore do ye spend money for that which is not bread? and your labour for that which satisfieth not?The same complaint as verse 7 - labour spent on what cannot satisfy - with the invitation that follows.
- Proverbs 27:20Hell and destruction are never full; so the eyes of man are never satisfied.The bottomless craving of verse 7 stated as a proverb - the desire that is never filled.
- Philippians 4:11I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content.The wisdom of verse 9 carried further - contentment with what is present, learned in Christ.
- Psalm 107:9For he satisfieth the longing soul, and filleth the hungry soul with goodness.The soul-hunger of verse 7 (Hebrew nephesh) finally filled - by God, who satisfies the longing soul.
Who Knoweth What Is Good for Man?
- Job 9:3-4If he will contend with him, he cannot answer him one of a thousand... who hath hardened himself against him, and hath prospered?The truth of verse 10 - man cannot contend with One mightier than he.
- James 4:14For what is your life? It is even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away.The life spent as a shadow (v. 12) - the brevity the Preacher names, echoed in the New Testament.
- John 6:68Lord, to whom shall we go? thou hast the words of eternal life.The answer to verse 12 - the One who knows what is good, who has the words of eternal life.
- Micah 6:8He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the LORD require of thee...A reply to the question of verse 12 - what is good for man, shown by the LORD.
- Colossians 2:3In whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.Where the unanswered question of verse 12 finds its answer - in the One who is the wisdom of God.