Ecclesiastes 8:10

And so I saw the wicked buried The English version is scarcely intelligible, and as far as it is so, goes altogether astray. We must therefore begin with a new translation, And so I have seen the wicked buried and they went their way (i. e.died a natural death and were carried to the grave); but from the holy place they departed (i. e.were treated with shame and contumely, in some way counted unholy and put under a ban), and were forgotten in the city, even such as acted rightly.

The verse will require, however, some explanation in details. In the burial of the wicked we have a parallel to the pregnant significance of the word in the parable of Dives and Lazarus, where "the rich man died and was buried" (Luke 16:22). This, from the Jewish standpoint, was the fit close of a prosperous and honoured life (comp. 2 Chronicles 16:14; 2Ch 26:23; 2 Chronicles 28:27; Jeremiah 22:18-19). It implied a public and stately ceremonial. The words "they are gone" are not, as some have thought, equivalent to "they have entered into rest" (Isaiah 57:2), but, as in ch. Ecclesiastes 1:4, are given as the way in which men speak respectfully of the dead as "gone" or "gathered to their fathers." So the Latins said Abiit ad plures. So we speak, half-pityingly, of the dead, "Ah, he's gone!"

The "holy place" may possibly mean the consecrated ground (I do not use the word in its modern technical sense) of sepulture, but there is no evidence that the term was ever so used among the Jews, and it is more natural to take it, as explained by the use of the same term in Matthew 24:15, as referring to the Temple. The writer has in his mind those whose names had been cast out as evil, who had been, as it were, excommunicated, "put out of the synagogue" (as in John 9:22; John 12:42), compelled to leave the Temple they had loved and worshipped in, departing with slow and sorrowing tread (comp. Psalms 38:6; Job 30:28). And soon their place knows them no more. A generation rises up that knows them not, and they are forgotten in the very city where they had once been honoured. The reflection was, perhaps, the result of a personal experience. The Debater himself may have been so treated. The hypocrites whom he condemned (ch. Ecclesiastes 5:1-7) may have passed their sentence upon him as heretical, as some did afterwards upon his writings (see Introduction, ch. iii). If he was suspected of being in any way a follower of Epicurus, that would seem to them a sufficient ground for their anathemas. Epicureanism was, as it were, to the later Rabbis the deadliest of all heresies, and when they wanted to brand the believers in Christ with the last stigma of opprobrium, they called them not Christians, or even Nazarenes, but Epicureans. Something of this feeling may be traced, as has been shewn in the Introduction, ch. v., even in the Wisdom of Solomon. The main thought, so far as it refers only to the perishableness of human fame, has been common to the observers of the mutability of human things in all ages, and the Debater had himself dwelt on it (chaps. Ecclesiastes 1:11; Ecclesiastes 6:4). It finds, perhaps, its most striking echo in a book which has much in common with one aspect of Ecclesiastes, the De Imitatione Christiof à Kempis (B. i. 3). In substituting "such as acted rightly" for "where they had so done," I follow the use of the word which the A. V. translates as "so" (ken); in 2 Kings 7:9 ("we do not well"); Numbers 27:7 ("speak right"); Exodus 10:29 ("thou hast spoken well"); Joshua 2:4; Proverbs 15:7; Isaiah 16:6; Jeremiah 8:6; Jeremiah 23:10, and other passages.

I have given what seems to me (following wholly, or in part, on the lines of Ginsburg, Delitzsch, Knobel, and Bullock), the true meaning of this somewhat difficult verse, and it does not seem expedient, in a work of this nature, to enter at length into a discussion of the ten or twelve conflicting and complicated interpretations which seem to me, on various grounds, untenable. The chief points at issue are (1) whether the "departing from the place of the holy" belongs to "the wicked" of the first clause, or to those who are referred to in the second; (2) whether it describes that which was looked on as honourable or dishonourable, a stately funeral procession from temple or synagogue, or a penal and disgraceful expulsion; and (3) whether the latter are those who "act so," i.e.as the wicked, or, as above, those who act rightly; and out of the varying combinations of the answers to these questions and of the various meanings attached to the phrases themselves, we get an almost indefinite number of theories as to the writer's meaning.

this is also vanity The recurrence of the refrainof the book at this point is interesting. It is precisely the survey of the moral anomalies of the world that originates and sustains the feeling so expressed.