Ecclesiastes 4:3

Yea, better is he than both they As the utterance of a personal feeling of despair we have a parallel in the words of Job (Ecclesiastes 3:11-16). As expressing a more generalised view of life we have multiform echoes of the thought in the Greek writers, of whose influence, direct or indirect, the book presents so many traces. Thus we have in Theognis:

Πάντων μὲν μὴ φῦναι ἐπιχθονίοισιν ἄριστον,

μηδʼ ἐσιδεῖν αὐγὰς ὀξέος ἠελίου·

φύντα δʼ ὄπως ὤκιστα πύλας Ἀΐδαο περῆσαι,

καὶ κεῖσθαι πολλὴν γῆν ἐπαμησάμενον.

"Best lot for men is never to be born,

Nor ever see the bright rays of the morn:

Next best, when born, to haste with quickest tread

Where Hades" gates are open for the dead,

And rest with much earth gathered for our bed."

425 428.

Or in Sophocles:

μὴ φῦναι τὸν ἄπαντα νικᾷ λόγον• τὸ δʼ, ἐπεὶ φανῇ,

βῆναι κεῖθεν ὄθεν περ ἤκει,

πολὺ δεύτερον, ὡς τάχιστα.

"Never to be at all

Excels all fame;

Quickly, next best, to pass

From whence we came."

Oed. Col. 1225.

More remote but of yet deeper significance is the fact that the same feeling lies at the root of Buddhism and its search after Nirvana(annihilation or unconsciousness) as the one refuge from the burden of existence. Terrible as the depression thus indicated is, it is one step higher than the hatred of life which appeared in chs. Ecclesiastes 1:14; Ecclesiastes 2:17-18. That was simply the weariness of a selfish satiety; this, like the feeling of Çakya Mouni when he saw the miseries of old age and disease and death, and of the Greek Chorus just quoted, rose from the contemplation of the sorrows of humanity at large. It was better not to be than to see the evil work that was done under the sun. In marked contrast with this dark view of life we have the words: "Good were it for that man not to have been born" in Matthew 26:24, as marking out an altogether exceptional instance of guilt and therefore of misery.