Ecclesiastes 7:28

Which yet my soul seeketh, but I find not,.... He was very earnest and diligent in his inquiry; he took a great deal of pains, and was exceedingly solicitous; he sought with great intenseness of

Which yet my soul seeketh, but I find not: one man among a thousand have I found; but a woman among all those have I not found.

My soul seeketh; it seemed so wonderful to me, that I suspected I had not made a sufficient inquiry, and therefore I returned to search again with more earnestness and accurateness. I find not; that it was so he found out, as he now said, but the whole truth and reason of the thing he could not find out. One man; one worthy of the name of a man; a wise and virtuous man. Man is put for a worthy or good man, as name is put for a good name, above, , and wife for a good wife, as was noted before. Among a thousand, with whom I have conversed. He is supposed to mention this number in allusion to his thousand wives and concubines, as they are numbered by parcels, . A woman; one worthy of that name; one who is not a dishonour to her kind and sex, who is not brutish in her disposition and conversation. Among all those in that thousand whom I have taken into intimate society with myself; whereby he also passeth a severe censure upon himself that he had associated himself with such persons, and not with the virtuous women, which doubtless there were in his time, as appears from Proverbs 31. It is not Solomon’ s design to disparage this sex, nor to make a general comparison between men and women in all places and ages, but only to suggest his own experience concerning it.

Ecclesiastes 7:28 Which yet my soul seeketh, but I find not: one man among a thousand have I found; but a woman among all those have I not found.Ver. 28. Which yet my soul seeketh, but I find not.] There is a place in Wiltshire called Stonhenge, for various great stones lying and standing there together: of which stones it is said, that though a man number them "one by one" never so carefully, yet that he cannot find the true number of them, but that every time he numbers them he finds a different number from that he found before. This may well show, as one well applies it, the erring of man’ s labour in seeking the acconnt of wisdom and knowledge; for, though his diligence be never so great in making the reckoning, he will always be out, and not able to find it out. One man among a thousand.] Haud facile iuvenies multis e milibus unum. There is a very great scarcity of good people. These are as Gideon’ s three hundred, when the wicked, as the Midianites, lie "like grasshoppers for multitude upon the earth," and as those Syrians, they fill the country, they darken the air, as the swarms did the land of Egypt; and there is plenty of such dust heaps in every corner. But a woman among all those have I not found,] i.e., Among all my wives and concubines, which made him ready to sing, Femina nulla bona est. There is no good woman. But that there are, and ever have been, many gracious women, see, besides the Scriptures, the writings of many learned men, De illustribus feminis. Concerning Illustrious Women. It is easy to observe, saith one, that the New Testament affords more store of good wives than the Old. And I can say, as Jerome does, Novi ego multas ad omne opus bonum promptas, I know many Tabithas full of good works. But in respect of the discovery of hearts and natures, whether in good or evil, it is harder to find out thoroughly the perfect disposition of a woman than of men; and that I take to be the meaning of this text. Camden.

(28) One man among a thousand.—See Job 9:3; Job 33:23. The disparaging estimate of the female sex here expressed is common in countries where polygamy is practised. (See Sir 25:24; Sir 42:13.) It is credible enough that Solomon, with his thousand wives, did not find a good one among them; but see Proverbs 18:22; Proverbs 19:14; Proverbs 31:10.

28. one man among a thousand have I found] We have, in the absence of an adjective, to supply the thought “a man such as he ought to be, truthful and righteous.” The form in which the rare exceptional discovery is given is as an echo from Job 9:3; Job 33:23. It represents we cannot doubt the capacity of the writer for a warm and earnest friendship. It shews that he had found one such friend. But what the seeker found among men, he sought in vain among women. Corruption there was, from his point of view, absolutely without exception. The interesting parallelism of Heine’s language has been noticed in the Introduction, ch. iii. The words may be received as recording the writer’s personal experience of the corrupt social state under the government of Persian or Egyptian kings. One commentator (Hitzig) has even ventured to identify the “woman more bitter than death” with a historical character, Agathoclea, the mistress of Ptolemy Philopator. Justin (xxx. 1) describes the King’s life “Meretricis illecebris capitur … noctes in stupris, dies in conviviis consumit.” Here also we have an echo of the darker side of Greek thought. The Debater catches the tone of the woman-hater Euripides. ἀλλʼ ? ὡςτὸμῶρονἀνδράσινμὲνοὐκἔνι,γυναιξὶδʼ ? ἐμπέφυκεν.“But folly does not find its home with men,But roots in women’s hearts.”Eurip. Hippol. 920. So a later Rabbinic proverb gives a like judgment: “woe to the age whose leader is a woman” (Dukes, Rabbin. Blumenl. No. 32).

One man - One whose good qualities quite satisfy our expectation. Compare the expression “one among a thousand” (marginal reference). A woman - The number of Solomon’s wives and concubines 1 Kings 11:3 was a thousand.

28. Which yet my soul seeketh, etc. — That is, The investigation is not yet concluded, so that the result may yet be altered.