Ecclesiastes 2:26

For God giveth The word for God, as the italics shew, is not in the Hebrew, but it is obviously implied, and its non-appearance justifies the change in the text of the previous verse, which preserves the sequence of thought unbroken. What we get here is the recognition of what we have learnt to call the moral government of God in the distribution of happiness. It is found to depend not on outward but inward condition, and the chief inward condition is the character that God approves. The Debater practically confesses that the life of the pleasure-seeker, or the ambitious, or the philosopher seeking wisdom as an end, was not good before God, and therefore failed to bring contentment.

wisdom, and knowledge, and joy The combination forms an emphatic contrast with ch. Ecclesiastes 1:18, and marks a step onward in the seeker's progress. There is a wisdom which is not grief, an increase of knowledge which is not an increase of sorrow. We are reminded of the parallel thought which belongs to a higher region of the spiritual life, "The Kingdom of God … is righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Ghost" (Romans 14:17). Here the lesson is that the man who seeks great things fails to find them, that he who is content with a little with God's blessing on it, finds in that little much. He becomes αὐτάρκης (self-sufficing) and has enough.

but to the sinner he giveth travail The words point to a further perception of a moral order in the midst of the seeming disorders of the world. The fruitless labour of the sinner in heaping up his often ill-gotten gains is not altogether wasted. His treasure passes into hands that make a better use of it than he has done. So we find a like thought in Proverbs 28:8, "He that by usury and unjust gains increaseth his substance, he shall gather it for him that will pity the poor," and in Job 27:16-17, "Though he heap up silver as the dust, and prepare raiment as the clay; he may prepare it, but the just shall put it on, and the innocent shall divide the silver" (comp. Proverbs 13:22).

This also is vanity The question which we have to answer is whether this sentence is passed only on the travail of the sinner, as in Ecclesiastes 2:11, or whether it includes also the measure of joy attainable by him who is "good" in the sight of God. From one point of view the former interpretation gives a preferable meaning, as more in harmony with what immediately precedes. On the other hand, it is characteristic of the cynical pessimism into which the Preacher has, by his own confession, fallen, that he should fall back into his despondency even after a momentary glimpse of a truth that might have raised him from it. The "Two Voices" utter themselves, as in Tennyson's poem, (see Appendix II.) in a melancholy alternation and there comes a time when the simple joys which God gives to the contented labourer, no less than the satiety of the voluptuous and the rich, seem to him but as "vanity and feeding upon wind. "