Ecclesiastes 4:5

The fool foldeth his hands together Simple as the words seem they have received very different interpretations: (1) The fool (the word is the same as in ch. Ecclesiastes 2:14-16, and is that, the prominence of which in both Proverbs and Ecclesiastes serve as a connecting link between the two Books), the man without aim or insight, leading a half brutish life, "folds his hands" in the attitude of indolence (Proverbs 6:10; Proverbs 24:33), and yet even he, with his limited desires, attains to the fruition of those desires, "eats his meat" and rejoices more than the wise and far-sighted who finds his dexterous and successful work empty and unsatisfying. (So Ginsburg.) For this sense of the words "eateth his flesh," we have the usage of Exodus 16:8; Exodus 21:28; Isaiah 22:13; Ezekiel 39:17. So taken, this thought coheres with the context, and expresses the sense of contrast between the failure of aspiring activity and skill to attain the happiness they aim at, and the fact that those who do not even work for enjoyment get as full a share of it perhaps, even a fuller as those who do. (2) The last clause has been interpreted, as in the A.V., as meaning literally that the slothful man "consumes his own flesh," i.e.reduces himself literally to the poverty and starvation which culminates in horrors such as this, as in Isaiah 9:20; Jeremiah 19:9, or, figuratively, pines away under the corroding canker of envy and discontent. For the latter meaning, however, we have no authority in the language of the Old Testament, and so taken, the passage becomes only a warning, after the manner of the Proverbs, against the sin of sloth, and as such, is not in harmony with the dominant despondency of this stage of the writer's experience. The view which sees in Ecclesiastes 4:5, the writer's condemnation of sloth, and in Ecclesiastes 4:6 the answer of the slothful, seems out of keeping with the context.