King James Version · The united kingdom
Ecclesiastes 8
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Who is as man? and who knoweth the of a thing? a man’s maketh to shine, and the boldness of shall be changed. I thee to keep the king’s , and that in regard of the of . Be not hasty to go out of his sight: stand not in an evil thing; for he doeth whatsoever pleaseth him. Where the word of a king is, there is : and who may say unto him, What doest thou? Whoso keepeth the shall feel no evil thing: and a man’s discerneth both time and . Because to every purpose there is time and , therefore the misery of man is great upon him. For he knoweth not that which shall be: for who can tell him when it shall be? There is no man that hath over to retain ; neither hath he in the day of : and there is no discharge in that war; neither shall wickedness those that are given to it. All this have I seen, and applied unto every work that is done under the sun: there is a time wherein one man ruleth over another to his own hurt. And so I saw buried, who had come and gone from the place of the , and they were forgotten in the city where they had so done: this is also . Because sentence against an evil work is not executed speedily, therefore of the sons of men is fully set in them to do evil. Though a do evil an hundred times, and his days be prolonged, yet surely I know that it shall be well with them that , which fear before him: But it shall not be well with , neither shall he prolong his days, which are as a shadow; because he feareth not before . There is a which is done upon the earth; that there be men, unto whom it happeneth according to the work of ; again, there be men, to whom it happeneth according to the work of : I said that this also is . Then I commended mirth, because a man hath no better thing under the sun, than to eat, and to drink, and to be merry: for that shall with him of his labour the days of his life, which giveth him under the sun. When I applied mine to know , and to see the business that is done upon the earth: (for also there is that neither day nor night seeth sleep with his eyes:) Then I beheld all the work of , that a man cannot find out the work that is done under the sun: because though a man labour to seek it out, yet he shall not find it; yea further; though a man think to know it, yet shall he not be able to find it.
The 1611 translation, public domain. Its original printing included the Apocrypha, which is why the deuterocanonical books can be read here. Notes and cards are EKLI’s own.
The world at this moment · The united kingdom, 1050 BC to 931 BC ›
Saul, David, and Solomon. A rare window when both Egypt and Mesopotamia are weak, which is how a small kingdom in the corridor between them could briefly become a regional power.
- The power vacuum
- This is the whole political explanation for the united kingdom. Egypt is fragmented, Assyria is recovering but still local, the Hittites are gone, and nobody is in a position to object to a strong state in the corridor. It lasts about a century, and Israel's golden age fits exactly inside it.
- Phoenicia
- Tyre under Hiram is the commercial power of the coast, and supplies the cedar, the craftsmen, and the shipping for Solomon's building programme. The alliance is trade, not charity: Israel had grain and a land route, Tyre had timber and ships.
- Egypt
- Weak enough that a pharaoh gives a daughter in marriage to an Israelite king, which is the opposite of Egyptian practice in stronger centuries. Late in the era it recovers under a new house, and Shishak will invade within five years of Solomon's death.
- Further afield
- Greece is still in its dark age but beginning to recover, and will adopt the Phoenician alphabet within a century or two. Carthage is founded by settlers from Tyre by tradition in 814 BC. In the Americas the Olmec centre shifts to La Venta.