Ecclesiastes 9:11

that the race is not to the swift The sequence of thought is that while it is a man's wisdom to do the work which he finds ready to his hand, he must not reckon on immediate and visible results. The course of the world witnesses many apparent failures even where men fulfil the apparent conditions of success. The wise and skilful often gain neither "bread" nor "favour," and the injustice of fortune is worse than that painted in the words of the Satirist, "Probitas laudatur et alget" (Juven. i. 74). So a poet of our own time has sung,

"Oh, if we draw a circle premature,

Heedless of far gain,

Greedy of quick return of profits, sure

Bad is our bargain."

Browning. A Grammarian's Funeral.

The thought of "the race" seems to belong to a time when contests of this nature had become familiar to the dwellers in Palestine, i.e.after they had come in contact with Greek habits, and is so far an argument for the later date of the book. In Malachi 1:14; Malachi 1:14; 2Ma 4:9-14, games of this kind are said to have been introduced in Jerusalem under Antiochus Epiphanes. On the assumption of Alexandrian authorship we may think of the hippodrome of that city as present to the writer's mind.

time and chance The first word is that which is so prominent in ch. Ecclesiastes 3:1-8; the second is found elsewhere only in 1 Kings 5:4, where it is translated "occurrent," the latter word being used, as commonly in the English of the 16th and 17th centuries, as a substantive. So in Shakespeare we have "So tell him, with the occurrentsmore and less," in Hamlet, Ecclesiastes 9:2.