Ecclesiastes 7:28 - Exposition

Which yet my soul seeketh , but I find not; or, which my soul hath still sought , but I have not found . The conclusion at which he did arrive was something utterly different from what he had hoped to achieve. The soul and the ego are separately regarded (comp. Ecclesiastes 7:25 ); the whole intellectual faculties were absorbed in the search, and the composite individual gives his consequent experience. One man ( Adam ) among a thousand have I found . He found only one man among a thousand that reached his standard of excellence—the ideal that he had formed for himself, who could be rightly called by the noble name of man. The phrase, "one of a thousand," occurs in Job 9:3 ; Job 33:23 ; Ecclesiasticus 6:6. Adam , the generic term, is used here instead of ish , the individual, to emphasize the antithetical ishah , " woman ," in the following clause, or to lead the thought to the original perfection of man's nature. So in Greek ἄνθρωπος is sometimes used for ἀνήρ , though generally the distinction between the two is sufficiently marked, as we find in Herodotus, 7:210, ὅτι πολλοὶ μὲν ἄνθρωποι εἶεν ὀλίγοι δὲ ἄνδρες . But a woman among all those have I not found ; i . e . not one woman in a thousand who was what a woman ought to be. Says the Son of Sirach, "All wickedness is but little to the wickedness of a woman; let the portion of a sinner fall upon her" (Ecclesiasticus 25:19). So the Greek gnome—

θάλασσα καὶ πῦρ καὶ γυνὴ κακὰ τρία .

"Three evils are there—sea, fire, and woman."

Solomon had a thousand wives and concubines, and his experience might well have been that mentioned in this passage.