Ecclesiastes 4:1

“So I returned, and considered” marks a fresh look at the world. The Preacher has already weighed wisdom, pleasure and wealth (Ecclesiastes 2) and found much of life “vanity”, the Hebrew hebel (also written hevel) of Ecclesiastes 1:2. Now, at the start of Ecclesiastes 4, he turns from the emptiness of one person’s pursuits to what people do to one another. He considers “all the oppressions that are done under the sun.” The word he uses, ʻâshûwq, comes from the verb ʻâshaq, to oppress, and it stands in the plural to mean oppression or tyranny: the stronger wronging the weaker, taking what is theirs and depriving them of their rights. The plural, together with “all”, tells us how widespread he found it.

Then he says “behold”, and he looks at the people themselves. The first thing he sees is their tears. The word dimʻâh means weeping or tears, and the Preacher puts the grief of the oppressed before us before he says a word about the oppressors. He looks closely, and what he sees moves him.

The next phrase is the heart of the verse: “and they had no comforter.” The word behind “comforter” comes from nâcham, whose root sense is to sigh, and from there to be sorry, to pity and to console. Here it stands as a participle, menachem, the one who consoles. The oppressed have nobody to pity them, to sit with them in their grief or to ease it.

Between the two cries comes the reason: “on the side of their oppressors there was power.” The power belonged to the people who caused the tears. It could be strength of arm, and it could also be wealth, standing or influence over the courts, any of which lets the strong do wrong and answer to nobody. In Israel and the nations round about, power often sat with kings, rich landowners, military leaders and corrupt officials, and the poor, the widow and the orphan had little recourse when they were wronged.

Then he says it again: “but they had no comforter.” The verse ends where it turned, with people left alone in their sorrow, and the repeated line makes us stay with them.

“Wherefore” ties verse 2 to the tears of verse 1. Having watched the oppressed weep, the Preacher says, “I praised the dead which are already dead more than the living which are yet alive.” The verb shâbach usually means to commend, praise or glory in, and he uses it here with grief and irony. He commends the dead for being out of reach of the oppression he has seen, and he says nothing in this verse about their character or about what lies after death. His praise is close to envy of those who have escaped.

“The dead” comes from mûwth, the ordinary verb to die, and the KJV keeps the doubling of the Hebrew, “the dead which are already dead.” Those people have finished their course, and the suffering of earth has ended for them. “The living” is chay, alive or living, and “yet alive” adds ʻăden, “till now” or “yet”. The living are those still in the world where the oppressions of verse 1 go on, and for them the tears are still running.

This is a cry of anguish, put in the strongest terms the Preacher can find, so that we feel how heavy the injustice is. Job said much the same in his suffering, wishing he had died at birth and lain in the quiet of the grave (Job 3:11–16). Paul writes that the creation was made subject to futility and groans, and that believers groan with it as they wait for their redemption (Romans 8:20–23). The Preacher’s longing for an end to suffering is real, and Scripture answers it with a hope he could only long for here.

“Yea, better is he than both they” goes one step further. “Both they” are the living and the dead of verse 2, and he now names a third, the one “which hath not yet been”, who was never born. The word for better is ṭôwb, good in the widest sense, covering what is pleasant, beautiful and well, and here it compares: this one is better off. “Not yet” is ʻăden, the same word as “yet alive” in verse 2.

The reason is in the last clause: he “hath not seen the evil work that is done under the sun.” The verb is râʼâh, to see. The Preacher has spent verse 1 looking at oppression, and the unborn one is spared that sight. “Evil” is raʻ, a word for bad in both senses, moral wickedness and the adversity, affliction, grief and misery that come with it. “Work” is maʻăseh, a deed or work. Together “the evil work” is the wrong that people do under the sun, the oppressors’ deeds above all, along with the suffering and weary toil that follow from it.

The three verses climb step by step. The living weep, the dead are better off, and the unborn are better off still. This is the farthest point the Preacher’s grief can reach, and it shows where a view of life limited to what happens under the sun ends. Elsewhere he says outright, “Therefore I hated life” (Ecclesiastes 2:17). Lamentations gives the same kind of grief to a man who has seen affliction (Lamentations 3:1–9).

The Preacher goes on to the envy that drives so much toil (Ecclesiastes 4:4) and the lonely man who labours without end and has nobody to labour for (Ecclesiastes 4:7–8). Then he praises companionship and warns of the danger of being alone (Ecclesiastes 4:9–12). Coming after the uncomforted of verse 1, that praise of companionship answers the loneliness of the oppressed. People were made to stand by one another, and the oppressed suffer most because nobody stands by them.

Twice the Preacher says that the oppressed had no comforter, and Christ promised his own that the Father would give them another Comforter, the Holy Spirit (John 14:16–18, John 14:26). Jesus is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world (John 1:29), and he came into this world of oppression with divine authority to set people free. Isaiah foretold the anointed one who would bring healing to the brokenhearted and release to the captives (Isaiah 61:1–3). He was a man of sorrows (Isaiah 53:3), obedient unto death on the cross (Philippians 2:8), where he redeemed us from the curse (Galatians 3:13). He counts what is done to the least of his brethren as done to himself (Matthew 25:40), so the tears the Preacher saw are seen by him.

The Preacher praised the dead because death ended their suffering. Christ has conquered death itself, so that death is swallowed up in victory (1 Corinthians 15:54–57), and he is the resurrection and the life (John 11:25–26). Anyone in Christ is a new creature (2 Corinthians 5:17), and those who sow in tears will reap in joy (Psalm 126:5–6). God has promised an end to the evil work under the sun: “God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away” (Revelation 21:4). The tears of the oppressed in this passage are among the tears he will wipe away.

Until that day, God comforts his people by his Spirit, and those he comforts become comforters in their turn. They speak for the defenceless and stand beside those who weep, which is the very thing the Preacher looked for and found lacking.