Ecclesiastes 3:20

All go unto one place The "place" thus spoken of is not the Sheolof the Hebrews or the Hadesof the Greeks, which implied, however vaguely, some notion of a shadowy disembodied existence, for the souls of men as distinct from those of brutes, but simply the earth as at once the mother, the nourisher, and the sepulchre of every form of life. So Lucretius, as a disciple of Epicurus, speaks (De Rer. Nat. v. 259) of earth as being

"Omniparens eadem rerum commune sepulcrum."

"The mother and the sepulchre of all."

all are of the dust There is an obviously deliberate reference to the narrative of the Creation in Genesis 2:7. To those who did not see below the surface, it seemed to affirm, as it did to the Sadducee, the denial of a life to come. "Dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return" was the sentence passed, they might say, as on the brute creation, so on man also (Genesis 3:19).