Ecclesiastes 9:3

This is an evil among all things The pessimism of the thinker returns once more upon him, and he falls into the strain which we have heard before in chs. Ecclesiastes 2:14-16; Ecclesiastes 3:19; Ecclesiastes 5:15; Ecclesiastes 6:12. The great leveller comes and sweeps away all distinctions, and there is no assured hope of immortality. Life is "evil" even while it lasts, and death is the same for all, when the curtain drops on the great drama.

madness is in their heart while they live The "madness" is that of chs. Ecclesiastes 1:17; Ecclesiastes 2:12. All man's life, in its vain strivings, its fond hopes, its wild desires, seems to the pessimist but as the "delirantium somnia." The English version seems to imply that the writer laid stress on the fact that the evildoers did not continue in existence to bear the penalty they deserved, but rested in the grave like others;

"After life's fitful fever they sleep well,"

but it is rather the Epicurean thought of death as the common lot, and the sigh with which it is uttered is, as it were, the unconscious protest of the philosophising Hebrew against the outcome of his philosophy. In what he heard of as a "short life and merry" he finds an insanity that ends in nothingness.