Ecclesiastes 7:17

Be not over much wicked There seems something like a paradox in the counsel. Surely, we think, the teacher is carrying his doctrine of the mean too far when he gives a precept, which, by forbidding excess, seems to sanction a moderate amount of wickedness. Various attempts have been made to tone down the precept by taking "wicked" as = not subject to rule, or = engaged in worldly affairs (the "mammon of unrighteousness") that so often lead to wickedness. The difficulty vanishes, however, if we will but admit that the writer might have learnt the art of a playful irony from his Greek teachers. He has uttered the precept, "Be not righteous over-much." That most men would receive as a true application of the doctrine of "Nothing in excess," or, in the phrase we owe to Talleyrand, "Surtout, point de zêle." He mentally sees, as it were, the complacent smile of those who were in no danger of that fault and who think that the precept gives them just the license they want, and he meets the feeling it expresses by another maxim. "Yes, my friends," he seems to say, "but there is another -over-much," against which you need a warning, and its results are even more fatal than those of the other." In avoiding one extreme men might fall easily into the other.

why shouldest thou die before thy time? Literally, Not in thy time. The form of the warning is singularly appropriate. The vices thought of and the end to which they lead are clearly those of the sensual license described in Proverbs 7. Death is the issue here, as the loss of spiritual discernment was of the Pharisaic or the over-philosophizing temper described in the preceding verse. In both precepts we may trace Koheleth's personal experience. Ch. 2 traces the history of one who in his life experiments had been both "over much wise," and, it must be feared, "over much wicked."