Ecclesiastes 8:14

SOLOMON'S SOLUTION FOR THE VANITY

"There is a vanity which is done upon the earth, that there are righteous men unto whom it happeneth according to the work of the wicked; again there are wicked men to whom it happeneth according to the work of the righteous: I said, This also is vanity. Then I commended mirth, because a man hath no better thing under the sun, than to eat, and to drink, and to be joyful: for that which shall abide with him in his labor all the days of his life which God hath given him under the sun."

"There is a vanity done upon the earth" (Ecclesiastes 8:14). "This says that the righteous get what the wicked deserve, and that the wicked get what the righteous deserve."[29]

What strikes us in this is Solomon's apparent ignorance of the Torah, or at least his total indifference to what is written there. The epic truth that righteous men unjustly suffer and are cut down in the prime of life, while the wicked prosper is dramatically illustrated by the Biblical account of the murder of Able and the subsequent prosperity of the man who murdered him. The conceited notion here that Solomon learned all that about such things from what he "had seen under the sun" is ridiculous. As a matter of simple fact, Solomon himself is the classical example of the wicked man being prospered "as it should have happened to a righteous man."

"Eat ... drink be joyful" (Ecclesiastes 8:15). Solomon's recommendation as the solution for all these exceptions to what should have been was his own version of Epicureans: "Eat drink and enjoy life." Again and again this is the recommendation that Solomon repeated over and over again in Ecclesiastes.