Ecclesiastes10chapter 10

Ecclesiastes 10:1-3

Dead flies cause the ointment: Dead flies in the perfumer's ointment state the chapter's rule of disproportion: a little folly outweighs a reputation for wisdom and honour, because corruption spreads and reputation cannot. The right hand and left of verse 2 are readiness against awkwardness, as the bench reads the idiom, not politics. Verse 3 completes the picture with the fool advertising himself by the way he walks the road, he saith to every one that he is a fool, needing no announcement but his conduct.

Ecclesiastes 10:4-7

If the spirit of the ruler rise up: The court cluster: when the ruler's anger rises, leave not thy place, for yielding pacifieth great offences, composure as a survival skill the Preacher had watched work. Then the evil he had seen under the sun, an error proceeding from the ruler: folly set in great dignity while the rich sit low, servants upon horses and princes walking as servants. The observation is filed without a program attached, which the commentators note as the book's manner: the world's placements are often inverted, and the wise man records it and keeps his head.

Ecclesiastes 10:8-11

He that diggeth a pit: Four hazards of work in a row: the pit-digger falling in, the hedge-breaker bitten by the serpent that nests in old walls, the quarrier hurt by his stones, the wood-cleaver endangered by his axe. The pit proverb is the reversal figure Proverbs 26:27 and Psalm 7:15 carry, and the hedge's serpent is Palestinian masonry fact before it is a moral, as the bench notes. The blunt iron of verse 10 gives the cluster its lesson, wisdom is profitable to direct: sharpening the edge beats adding strength, and verse 11 adds the timing clause, the charmer's skill is worthless after the serpent has bitten.

Ecclesiastes 10:12-15

The words of a wise man’s mouth are gracious: The fool's words cluster, traced as a progression: gracious words from the wise against lips that swallow up himself, a talk that begins in foolishness and ends in mischievous madness, and a fool full of words precisely about what no man can tell, the future. Verse 15's closing stroke, he knoweth not how to go to the city, is the proverb for incompetence in the obvious, as Gill reads it, wearied by labour that never finds the plain road everyone else can see. The cluster's order is its argument: words multiply as wisdom fails.

Ecclesiastes 10:16-20

when thy king is a child: The chapter closes on the state and the tongue. Woe to the land whose king is a child and whose princes eat in the morning, blessed the land whose king is the son of nobles and whose princes eat in due season, for strength, and not for drunkenness: government judged by its appetites, as Henry puts it. The dropping house of verse 18 applies the sloth doctrine to administration, and verse 19's money answereth all things is the courtiers' creed reported in their own voice, which the bench reads as observation rather than counsel. The last verse gives the cluster its famous caution: curse not the king, no not in thy thought, for a bird of the air shall carry the voice, the proverb every language borrowed.