¹³ moreover, it is God’s gift that all should eat and drink and take pleasure in all their toil.

⁷ Go, eat your bread with enjoyment and drink your wine with a merry heart, for God has long ago approved what you do.^(A)

²⁴ There is nothing better for mortals than to eat and drink and find enjoyment in their toil. This also, I saw, is from the hand of God,^(A)

¹⁸ This is what I have seen to be good: it is fitting to eat and drink and find enjoyment in all the toil with which one toils under the sun the few days of the life God gives us, for this is our lot.^{(A) 19} Likewise, all to whom God gives wealth and possessions and whom he enables to enjoy them and to accept their lot and find enjoyment in their toil—this is the gift of God.^{(B) 20} For they will scarcely brood over the days of their lives because God keeps them occupied with the joy of their hearts.

³⁰ You shall become engaged to a woman, but another man shall lie with her. You shall build a house but not live in it. You shall plant a vineyard but not enjoy its fruit.^{(A) 31} Your ox shall be butchered before your eyes, but you shall not eat of it. Your donkey shall be stolen in front of you and shall not be restored to you. Your sheep shall be given to your enemies without anyone to help you.

² those to whom God gives wealth, possessions, and honor, so that they lack nothing of all that they desire, yet God does not enable them to enjoy these things, but a stranger enjoys them. This is vanity; it is a grievous ill.^(A)

³ For whenever the Israelites put in seed, the Midianites and the Amalekites and the people of the east would come up against them.^{(A) 4} They would encamp against them and destroy the produce of the land, as far as the neighborhood of Gaza, and leave no sustenance in Israel, nor any sheep or ox or donkey.^{(B) 5} For they and their livestock would come up, and they would even bring their tents, as thick as locusts; neither they nor their camels could be counted, so they wasted the land as they came in.^{(C) 6} Thus Israel was greatly impoverished because of Midian, and the Israelites cried out to the Lord for help.^(D)

⁴⁷ “Because you did not serve the Lord your God joyfully and with gladness of heart for the abundance of everything,^{(A) 48} therefore you shall serve your enemies whom the Lord will send against you, in hunger and thirst, in nakedness and lack of everything. He will put an iron yoke on your neck until he has destroyed you.^(B)