The Teacher who wrote the book of Ecclesiastes continued to describe the heavy burden, which some wealthy men are made to bear. While they receive their power and wealth through divine providence, the Lord simply will not give them the gift of satisfaction in their labor, as the Lord does for many other folks. In some manner they had abused their privileged status, so the Lord withheld the expected joy in life many other men have over what they were able to do. At this point in his thesis, the Teacher describes a hypothetical case where a man may have had one hundred children (Ecclesiastes 6:3), a surreal contrast to the man whose wealth is devoured by strangers (Ecclesiastes 6:2). Unless Solomon is writing hyperbolically, he must be describing the state of affairs of a king who had many wives and concubines (cp. 2Kings 10:1; 2Chronicles 11:21).
Moreover, we are told this man, like the man whose wealth was devoured by strangers, had all he could ever desire, but he was, nevertheless, unable to enjoy his accomplishments, because for one reason or another, the Lord kept from him the joy that should have been his under normal circumstances. Solomon (the Teacher in the book) concludes that a woman’s miscarriage is a better state of affairs than to have a successful royal birth but live like this unhappy king, who died in humiliation (Ecclesiastes 6:3). He may have been defeated and slain on the battlefield, where his body was left for the fowls and other beasts of prey to devour (Jeremiah 22:18-19; cp. 1Samuel 17:46), but whatever the circumstances of his end, it was not an honorable one. That is, he didn’t finish as he may have hoped, or how other men would desire for themselves.
Whatever the state of affairs experienced by this ‘king’, the Teacher means for his readers to understand that it would have been better, if this privileged sovereign had never been born. One could sum up his pitiful life by comparing it to the miscarriage of a woman, whose fruit grew in darkness but was carried away to lay in eternal darkness, never experiencing light, good or evil. Although this king lived in wealth, he never enjoyed it. He labored, but was never fulfilled. Therefore, his whole life was like a miscarriage of joyless labor, concluding in the darkness of an undesirable and dishonorable death. Under such circumstances, the Teacher concludes a woman’s miscarriage is a better state of affairs than his (Ecclesiastes 6:4-5).
Moreover, to extend such a life in hope of a different outcome wouldn’t end as one might hope. Because, no matter how long this man’s life could be extended, even if he lived as long as any one of the patriarchs of the Antediluvian Age, or twice their age, approaching two thousand years, yet this man’s end would be the same, meaningless, undesirable, and dishonorable miscarriage of life (Ecclesiastes 6:6). Both he and the dead ass lying in the field, whose remains are devoured by animals of prey, have the same dark end. Truly, this is a heavy burden for any man to bear, who was born to a privileged position!
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