Ecclesiastes 7:28

one man among a thousand have I found We have, in the absence of an adjective, to supply the thought "a man such as he ought to be, truthful and righteous." The form in which the rare exceptional discovery is given is as an echo from Job 9:3; Job 33:23. It represents we cannot doubt the capacity of the writer for a warm and earnest friendship. It shews that he had found one such friend. But what the seeker found among men, he sought in vain among women. Corruption there was, from his point of view, absolutely without exception. The interesting parallelism of Heine's language has been noticed in the Introduction, ch. iii. The words may be received as recording the writer's personal experience of the corrupt social state under the government of Persian or Egyptian kings. One commentator (Hitzig) has even ventured to identify the "woman more bitter than death" with a historical character, Agathoclea, the mistress of Ptolemy Philopator. Justin (xxx. 1) describes the King's life "Meretricis illecebris capitur … noctes in stupris, dies in conviviis consumit."

Here also we have an echo of the darker side of Greek thought. The Debater catches the tone of the woman-hater Euripides.

ἀλλʼ ὡς τὸ μῶρον ἀνδράσιν μὲν οὐκ ἔνι,

γυναιξὶ δʼ ἐμπέφυκεν.

"But folly does not find its home with men,

But roots in women's hearts."

Eurip. Hippol. 920.

So a later Rabbinic proverb gives a like judgment: "woe to the age whose leader is a woman" (Dukes, Rabbin. Blumenl. No. 32).