Ecclesiastes 9:14

there was a little city The city has been identified by one commentator (Hitzig) with Dora, which was besieged unsuccessfully by Antiochus the Great in b.c. 218 (Polyb. 9:66). Josephus describes it, in his narrative of its siege by Antiochus Sidetes (Ant.xiii. 7, § 2), as "a city hard to be taken," but we know nothing of any special incidents corresponding to the allusion in this passage. The term "greatking" fits in with the hypothesis, as also does the fact that the siege was raised, but that is all. The spiritualising interpretations which have found favour with Jewish and Christian commentators, in which the history represents something like the attack of Satan on the town of Mansoul (as in Bunyan's Holy War), must be rejected as altogether arbitrary and fantastic.

and built great bulwarks against it The "bulwarks," as in the Old Testament generally, are the out-works of the besiegers, the banks or mounds from which missiles were thrown into the city (comp. Deuteronomy 20:20; 2 Samuel 20:15; 2 Chronicles 26:15).