Ecclesiastes 3:19

that which befalleth the sons of men More accurately, chance are the sons of men; chance is the beast; one chance is to both of them. The thought is emphasized by the threefold iteration of the depressing word. As so often throughout the book, we have an echo, almost a verbal translation, of a Greek saying. So Solon had said to Crœsus in a discourse which breathes the very spirit of Ecclesiastes (Herod. i. 32), πᾶν ἐστι ἄνθρωπος συμφορή ("man is altogether a chance").

as the one dieth, so dieth the other The words are not without a partial parallel in the more devotional literature of Israel. The writer of Psalms 49 had given utterance to the thought "man that is in honour … is like the beasts that perish." With him, however, this was affirmed only of those that "trust in their wealth," the triumphant, self-indulgent evildoers, and it was balanced by the belief that "God would redeem" his soul "from the power of the grave." Here the same thought is generalised in the tones of a half cynical despair, all the more striking if we assume that the belief in immortality, as afterwards developed in the creed of Pharisaism, was at the time gaining a more definite form among the writer's countrymen. It may be traceable either to the reaction against the germs of Pharisaism which was afterwards represented by the Sadducees, or, as seems more probable from the general tone and character of the book, to the influence of the Greek thought, such as was embodied in the teaching of Epicurus and Pyrrho, with which the writer had come in contact.

yea, they have all one breath The word is the same as the "spirit" of verse Ecclesiastes 3:19, and seems deliberately chosen with reference to the record of Genesis 2:7. The writer asks, What after all was that "breath of life?" Was there not a like "breath of life" in every beast of the field? It is significant that this is the only passage in the Old Testament in which the word is used definitely for the living principle of brutes, though we find it in Genesis 6:17; Genesis 7:15; Genesis 7:22; Psalms 104:30 for the life which is common both to them and man. Commonly, as in Job 12:10; Job 32:8, it is contrasted with the "soul" which represents their lower life.

a man hath no preeminence above a beast This then was the conclusion to which the thinker was led by the materialism which he had imbibed from his Greek or Sadducean teachers. Put aside the belief in the prolongation of existence after death, that what has been begun here may be completed, and what has gone wrong here may be set right, and man is but a more highly organised animal, the "cunningest of Nature's clocks" (to use Huxley's phrase), and the high words which men speak as to his greatness are found hollow. They too are "vanity." He differs from the brutes around him only, or chiefly, in having, what they have not, the burden of unsatisfied desires, the longing after an eternity which after all is denied him.