Ecclesiastes 8:9

All this have I seen The formula which had been used before (chs. Ecclesiastes 5:18; Ecclesiastes 7:23) to enforce the results of the Debater's experience of life in general, is now employed to emphasize the wide range of the political induction on which the conclusions of the previous verses rested.

there is a time wherein one man ruleth over another to his own hurt The Hebrew is, as in so many other instances, ambiguous. The English reflexive pronoun, in which our Version follows the Vulgate, misrepresents the purport of the sentence. What is described is, as before, the misrule of the tyrant-king who rules over others (the indefinite "another" standing for the plural) to their hurt. The wide induction had not been uniform in its results. The law of Nemesis was traversed by the law of apparent impunity. We have the "two voices" once again, and the writer passes, like Abelard in his Sic et Non, from affirmation to denial. The English version seems to have originated in the wish to make this verse also repeat the affirmation of the preceding. The immediate context that follows shews however that this is not now the writer's thought, and that he is troubled by the apparent exceptions to it.