Ecclesiastes 6:3

THE TRAGEDY OF THE GREAT MAN DENIED A BURIAL

"If a man beget a hundred children, and live many years, so that the days of his years are many, but his soul is not filled with good, and moreover he have no burial; I say that an untimely birth is better than he: for it cometh in vanity, and departeth in darkness, and the name thereof is covered in darkness; moreover it hath not seen the sun nor known it; this hath rest rather than the other: yea, though he live a thousand years twice told, and yet enjoy no good, do not all go to one place?"

"If a man beget a hundred children, and live many years" (Ecclesiastes 6:3). For a man with 700 wives and 300 concubines, this was by no means an impossibility. As a matter of fact, Gideon fathered 70 sons (Judges 8:30).

"His soul be not filled with good ... and ... he have no burial" (Ecclesiastes 6:4). It is a tragic fact of life that, "In spite of family, longevity and fame, life may so miscarry as to incur life-long dissatisfaction and an unmourned death."[2]

In the light of ancient concern regarding one's proper burial, it would appear here that a man's not being properly buried was considered as the ultimate disaster that could befall a human being. Christians, of course, reject this viewpoint out of hand. Some of the early Christians were fed to the lions in the Coliseum; but God's people remembered the words of Jesus: "Fear not them that kill the body, but after that have no more that they can do" (Luke 12:4).

The pyramids of Egypt and the elaborate historical sepulchres of the wealthy and the great stand as mute and terrible monuments to the materialistic blindness of mankind that regarded the body as actually all that there was to a human being. In the ultimate resurrection of the dead, the inspired apostle tells us quite forcefully in his vision of the Resurrection that, "The sea gave up the dead that were in it" (Revelation 20:13). The bodies of such as were drowned in the sea would have been totally consumed.

The last verses of this paragraph affirm that a still-born fetus is better than a man who was denied an honorable burial.

"This hath rest rather than the other" (Ecclesiastes 6:5). Let men contemplate what is stated here. If a man should live 2,000 years, he still would find that the earth is no place to rest.