Ecclesiastes 7:1

A good name is better than precious ointment The sequence of thought is interrupted, and the writer, instead of carrying on the induction which is to prove that all is vanity, moralizes on the other results of his experience. He has learnt to take a relative estimate of what men count good or evil, truer than that which commonly prevails among them. It lies almost in the nature of the case, that these moralizings should take a somewhat discontinuous form, like that, e.g.of the Penséesof Pascal or the Meditationsof Marcus Aurelius, the entries, let us say, which the thinker entered, day by day, in his tablets or on his codex. They are marked, however, by a sufficient unity of tone. The same pensive cast of thought is found in all, and it raises the thinker out of a mere self-seeking, self-indulgent Epicureanism into a wider and nobler sympathy. He rises as on the "stepping-stones" of his "dead self" to higher things. Nor are the maxims indeed without a certain unity of form, and the three words "it is better" in Ecclesiastes 7:1; Ecclesiastes 7:5; Ecclesiastes 7:8 serve as a connecting link. The words and the maxims that follow in Ecclesiastes 7:2-5 have naturally been a stumblingblock to those who saw in Koheleth nothing but the advocate of a sensual voluptuousness, and with the desperate courage of men maintaining a theory, they argue (I take Grätz as the representative of a school) that these are not the thoughts of the Debater himself, but of some imaginary opponent of the ascetic Essene type, against whom he afterwards enters his protest. The view is, it is believed, just as untenable as that of the interpreters of the opposite school, who see in the oft-repeated precepts counselling moderate enjoyment nothing but the utterances of an ideal Epicurean, set up for the purpose of being knocked down.

In the maxim which opens the series there is an alliterative emphasis, which is fairly represented by the German translation (Knobel) "Besser gut Gerücht als güte Gerüche. The good name (shem) is better than good ointment (shemen), echoing in this respect the words of Song Song of Solomon 1:3, "A good name is better than good nard," is perhaps the nearest English approximation in this respect. The maxim itself indicates a craving for something higher than the perfumed oil, which was the crowning luxury of Eastern life (Psalms 45:8; Amos 6:6; Luke 7:37; Matthew 26:7), even the praise and admiration of our fellow-men. To live in their memories, our name as a sweet odour that fills the house, is better than the most refined enjoyment. The student of the Gospel history will recall the contrast between the rich man who fared sumptuously every day (Luke 16:19), whose very name is forgotten, and who is remembered only as a type of evil, and the woman whose lavish gift of the ointment of spikenard is told through the whole world as a memorial of her (Mark 14:9), and who is identified by John, John 12:3, with Mary of Bethany.

and the day of death than the day of one's birth The two parts of the thought hang closely together. If the "good name" has been earned in life, death removes the chance of failure and of shame. In the language of Solon (Herod. i. 32) only he who crowns a prosperous life by a peaceful death can be called truly happy. The thought presents, however, a strange contrast to the craving for life which was so strong an element, as in Hezekiah's elegy (Isaiah 38:9-20), of Hebrew feeling, and is, like similar thoughts in ch. Ecclesiastes 6:3-4, essentially ethnic in its character. So Herodotus (Ecclesiastes 7:4) relates that the Trausi, a Thracian tribe, met on the birth of a child and bewailed the woes and sorrows which were its inevitable portion, while they buried their dead with joy and gladness, as believing that they were set free from evils and had entered on happiness, or at least on the unbroken rest of the eternal sleep. So Euripides, apparently with reference to this practice, of which he may well have heard at the court of Archelaus, writes in his Cresphontes,

ἐδεῖ γὰρ ἡμᾶς σύλλογον ποιουμένους

τὸν φύντα θρηνεῖν, εἰς ὅσʼ ἔρχεται κακά•

τὸν δʼ αὖ θανόντα καὶ πόνων πεπαυμένον

χαίροντας εὐφημοῦντας ἐκπέμπειν δόμων.

"It were well done, comparing things aright,

To wail the new-born child for all the ills

On which he enters; and for him who dies

And so has rest from labour, to rejoice

And with glad words to bear him from his home."

Strabo, who quotes the lines (xi. c. 12, p. 144), attributes the practice to Asiatic nations, possibly to those who had come under the influence of that Buddhist teaching as to the vanity and misery of life of which even the partial pessimism of Koheleth may be as a far-off echo.