Ecclesiastes 10:12-15

New English Translation

Footnotes

1. Ecclesiastes 10:12 tn Heb “of a wise man’s mouth.”
2. Ecclesiastes 10:12 tn The phrase “win him” does not appear in the Hebrew text, but has been supplied in the translation for clarity.
3. Ecclesiastes 10:12 tn Or “are gracious.” The antithetical parallelism suggests that חֵן (khen) does not denote “gracious character” but “[gain] favor” (e.g., Gen 39:21; Exod 3:21; 11:3; 12:36; Prov 3:4, 34; 13:15; 22:1; 28:23; Eccl 9:11); cf. HALOT 332 s.v. חֵן 2; BDB 336 s.v. חֵן 2. The LXX, on the other hand, rendered חֶן with χάρις (charis, “gracious”). The English versions are divided: “are gracious” (KJV, YLT, ASV, NASB, NIV) and “win him favor” (NEB, RSV, NRSV, NAB, MLB, NJPS, Moffatt).
4. Ecclesiastes 10:12 tn Heb “lips.”
5. Ecclesiastes 10:12 tn Heb “consume him”; or “engulf him.” The verb I בָּלַע (balaʿ, “to swallow”) creates a striking wordplay on the homonymic root II בָּלַע (“to speak eloquently”; HALOT 134-35 s.v בלע). Rather than speaking eloquently (II בלע, “to speak eloquently”), the fool utters words that are self-destructive (I בָּלַע, “to swallow, engulf”).
6. Ecclesiastes 10:13 tn Heb “the words of his mouth.”
7. Ecclesiastes 10:13 sn The terms “beginning” and “end” form a merism, a figure of speech in which two opposites are contrasted to indicate totality (e.g., Deut 6:7; Ps 139:8; Eccl 3:2-8). The words of a fool are madness from “start to finish.”
8. Ecclesiastes 10:13 tn Heb “his mouth.”
9. Ecclesiastes 10:13 tn Heb “madness of evil.”
10. Ecclesiastes 10:14 tn Heb “and the fool multiplies words.” This line is best taken as the third line of a tricola encompassing 10:13-14a (NASB, NRSV, NJPS, Moffatt) rather than the first line of a tricola encompassing 10:14 (KJV, NEB, RSV, NAB, ASV, NIV). Several versions capture the sense of this line well: “a fool prates on and on” (Moffatt) and “Yet the fool talks and talks!” (NJPS).
11. Ecclesiastes 10:14 tn Heb “after him”; or “after he [dies].”
12. Ecclesiastes 10:15 tn The plural form of הַכְּסִילִים (hakk^esilim, from כְּסִיל, k^esil, “fool”) denotes (1) plural of number: referring to several fools or (2) plural of habitual character or plural of intensity (referring to a single person characterized by a habitual or intense quality of foolishness). The latter is favored because the two verbs in 10:15 are both singular in form: “wearies him” (תְּיַגְּעֶנּוּ, t^eyagg^eʿennu) and “he does [not] know” (לֹא־יָדַע, loʾ yadaʿ); see GKC 440-41 §135.p. The article on הַכְּסִילִים is used in the generic sense.
13. Ecclesiastes 10:15 tn This line may be interpreted in one of three ways: (1) “the labor of fools wearies him because he did not know enough to go to a town,” referring to the labor of the peasants who had not been able to find a place in town where life was easier; (2) “the labor of the fools so wearies everyone of them (singular pronoun taken in a distributive sense) so much that he even does not know how to go to town,” that is, he does not even know how to do the easiest thing in the world; (3) “let the labor of fools so weary him that he may not even know how to go to town,” taking the verb as a jussive, describing the foolish man described in 10:12-14. See D. Barthélemy, ed., Preliminary and Interim Report on the Hebrew Old Testament Text Project, 3:592-93.
14. Ecclesiastes 10:15 tn Heb “he does not know to go to the city.”