Ecclesiastes 7:25

I applied mine heart to know The present text and punctuation give, as in the marginal reading of the A. V., I and my heart. The expression has no exact parallel in O. T. language, but harmonizes with the common mode of speech, familiar enough in the poetry of all times and countries, furnishing a title ("My Soul and I") to a poem of Whittier's, in which a man addresses his heart or soul (comp. Luke 12:19), as something distinguishable from himself. So in ch. Ecclesiastes 1:13 we have "I gave my heart." Here the thought implied seems to be that of an intense retrospective consciousness of the experience, or experiment, of life which the seeker is about to narrate. The words indicate another return to the results of that experience and the lessons it had taught him. He turned to ask the "reason," better perhaps, the planor rationale, of the prevalence of madness and folly. We note, as before in ch. Ecclesiastes 2:12, the Stoic manner of dealing with the follies of men as a kind of mental aberration.