Ecclesiastes 9:5

For the living know that they shall die The writer in one of the strange paradoxes of the mood of pessimism finds that though life is vanity, it is yet better than the death which he looks upon as its only outcome. There is a greatness in the very consciousness of the coming doom. Man, knowing he must perish and lamenting over his fate, is nobler than those that are already numbered with the dead. There is a pride even in the cry with which those who enter on the arena as doomed to death greet the sovereign Power that dooms them:

"Ave, Cæsar; morituri te salutamus."

"Hail to thee Cæsar, hail! on our way to our death-doom we greet thee."

They were nobler then than when their bleeding and mangled car-cases on the arena were all that was left of them.

neither have they any more a reward The words exclude the thought (in the then phase of the Debater's feeling) of reward in a life after death, but the primary meaning of the word is that of "hire" and "wages" (Genesis 30:28; Exodus 2:9), and the idea conveyed is that the dead no longer find, as on earth, that which rewards their labour. There is no longer even death to look forward to as the wages of his life.

So we have in Shakespeare:

"Thou thy worldly task hast done,

Home art gone and ta'en thy wages."

Cymbeline, Act iv., Sc. 2.

for the memory of them is forgotten The Hebrew gives an assonance between "reward" (sheker) and "memory" (zeker), which it is hard to reproduce in English. "Reward" and "record" suggest themselves as the nearest approximation. For the thought see note on ch. Ecclesiastes 1:11. Even the immortality of living in the memory of others, which modern thinkers have substituted for the Christian hope, is denied to the vast majority of mankind.