Ecclesiastes 2:25

For who can eat The sequence of thought is obscure, and many commentators follow the LXX. and the Syriac version, as implying an original text which gives a better meaning, Who can eat and who can hasten (i.e.be eager in this pursuit of pleasure), or, as some take the words, have enjoyment, without Him, i.e.without God. This, it is obvious, follows on the thought of the preceding verse, that the calm enjoyment of which it speaks as "good," is "from the hand of God." Those who keep to the received text give it very different meanings, of which the two most prominent are: (1) that we have, as it were, the words of the labourer whose lot the Debater here admired, "Who has a right to eat and enjoy himself, if not I?" the thought being parallel to that of 2 Timothy 2:6 ("The husbandman that laboureth must be first partaker of the fruits"); and (2) that the Debater speaks in his own person, "Who could eat or enjoy more than I? Who therefore can better attest that it is all in vain without the gift of God." On the assumption that the writer was one who had come into contact with Greek thought, we may trace in this utterance partly the old faith of Israel reasserting itself and giving a higher sanction to the life of regulated enjoyment which the Greek teachers counselled, partly, perhaps, the mingling of Stoic and Epicurean counsels natural in a mind that had listened to both and attached himself definitely to neither. So in the Meditationsof Aurelius we have like thoughts: πάντα γὰρ ταῦτα θεῶν βοηθῶν καὶ τύχης δειται ("all these things require the help of the Gods and of Fortune"); and again τὰ τῶν Θεῶν προνίας μεστὰ ("the works of the Gods are full of Providence" (Meditt. ii. 3). Koheleth, of course, as an Israelite, used the language of the wiser Stoics, like Cleanthes, and spoke of one God only.