We are back to dealing with the king in these last verses of chapter 10.  While we, as Americans, may not understand all that it means to live under a king, we do live under authority and our brand of democracy may not necessarily breed the most respectful attitude towards that authority and the men and women who wield it.

Textually, v.16 is a bit of a wild card as can be seen from the various translations (NASB, NLT). The upshot appears to be that when the king is unable to properly wield his authority, for whatever reason, those under him begin to devour what is rightfully his.

Questions:

1. Compare and contrast vv. 16-17.  What do you see that are similar and what do you see that are different in the conditions the Teacher presents to us?  What are the conditions of ‘woe’ and ‘blessing’?  What are the behaviors of the princes involved?  Can you see any differences in what is driving those behaviors?
2. Do these comments on kings apply to other people and areas of authority?  Where are the areas of your life where you are the one in authority?  Where are the areas of your life where you under authority?
3. 10:18 points to maintenance, that what we have needs to be maintained or it begins to decay and lose its functionality.  What do you have that is in need of maintenance?  Why is it in need of maintenance?
4. Again, do you think that these verses can only apply to rafters and roofs?
5. 10:19 - Is money the answer for everything?  Why or why not?  What do you think that the Teacher is saying in this verse?
6. 10:20 - What is your attitude towards authority and ‘rich men’?  Do you revile or curse those in authority?  What did you say about this last national election?  How about the one previous to that?
7. Given that these verses are bracketed by references to the king, what do you think they mean within the context of our relationships with authority?  Are you properly maintaining your authority in those areas where it has been given to you?  Are you ‘feasting’ on someone else’s authority?  Are the rafters of authority sagging in your household or your place of work?  Does chaos rule?  As the one who holds authority, are you respected or reviled?  As one who is under authority, are you respecting or cursing?
8. Do you think that you are to be part of the problem or part of the solution?  What can you do to improve the maintenance of authority in your home and at your place of work?

Again, we are in the ‘home stretch’ where the Teacher is giving us the conclusions.  In these verses, the Teacher is juxtaposing wisdom and folly as demonstrated by the behavior of both.  The questions to keep in mind are ‘What is true wisdom?’, ‘What is true folly?’ and ‘How do we identify both in the real world?’

Questions:

1. If you had been an observer to the siege described in vv. 9:13-14, what would your prediction as to the outcome have been?
2. What were the critical factors in the saving of the city?  Who had to speak and who had to listen for the city to be saved?  What are the Teachers conclusions about wisdom and strength?  What was the end result for the wise man?
3. What are the basic assumptions that lead to wisdom being forgotten?  How does one sinner gain the power and influence to destroy much good?
4. 10:1 - What is the relative influence of folly, wisdom and honor?  Does this seem to be correct in your way of thinking?  What are the kinds of behavior that influences how our culture thinks about people?  Which carry more weight?  How do you think about people and their behavior?  Does one act of folly carry more weight with you as your opinions form that many acts of wisdom and honor?
5. 10:2-3 - How is foolishness revealed in these verses?  How does the heart (that ‘inner self’ where we come to conclusions about the reality of the world we live in) of the wise man and the fool reveal itself?  Look around at the people that you are walking with.  What is it that you see as driving their decisions and behaviors?  What does the fact that you are in their company say about what is driving your decisions and behaviors? (Matthew 7:13-14)
6. 10:4-7 - What do these verses suggest to you about the dangers and temptations of those in authority when it comes to making people decisions?  Remember that the Teacher had intimate, first-hand experience with these issues.  Who is looking to have influence with you?  What do you look for in people?  How do you decide if a person is wise or foolish?
7. How are you seeking to influence those around you, your peers, those in authority above you and those under your authority?
8. 10:8-11 - What do you think the Teacher is trying to say about the work you choose to do?
9. 10:12-15 - What does the Teacher say is the way to identify the wise man?  What identifies the fool?  If you could step back and look at yourself, where do you fall on this scale?  Are your words gracious or do you identify all your own faults by what you condemn in others?  Do your words take on a life of their own and become ‘wicked madness’ and multiply out of control?  Do you find yourself lost in the middle of the wilderness and not even know which way town is?

The Teacher has just finished talking about the work of God and the work of man (7:13-8:17) and is now turning into the home stretch and giving us his conclusions.  It would seem that the questions to keep in mind are ‘Where is the line between my work and God’s work?’ and ‘Have I crossed that line?’

Questions:

1. What is it that the Teacher is reflecting on?
2. What is his conclusion?  Where or when is it that no man knows if love or hate awaits him?
3. 9:2 - Is there anyone that is excluded from this common destiny?  Is there a common thread that runs through the teachers descriptions here?  What is being contrasted in each of these pairings?
4. 9:3 - What makes the fact that the same destiny overtakes us all an evil under the sun?  From whose point of view would this be an evil?  What is the Teacher apparently lamenting that gets lost in these next verses (vv.4-6)
5. What is in the hearts of men while they live?  How does this contrast with righteous and the wise?  What sets these two groups apart?  Are they set apart?  Can the righteous and wise be full of evil and have madness in their hearts?
6. 9:7-10 - How many times has the Teacher said ‘Enjoy what you eat and drink’ or some variation on that theme?  How important is this concept to the Teacher and what he is teaching?  What does he add here to the basic concept?
7. Can your days be meaningless if they are given to you by God Himself?
8. What is the lot that we have been given?  Is eating and drinking with joy, enjoying life with my spouse and doing whatever my hand finds to do with all my heart an impossible and grievous task?
9. How does this compare to the attitude you currently have towards life and what it is you are required to do?  What are the similarities and differences?  What is it that makes you think that you have to do more?
10. What does the Teacher say we are not going to find in the grave?  From your point of view, is this a good thing or a bad thing?
11. 9:11 - What do these conclusions by the Teacher point to?  If all that counted was man’s work, talents and wisdom would the race go to the swift and the battle to the strong?  What is the critical factor in all of this?  Do you see ‘time and chance’ as the Finger of God intervening in your life?
12. 9:12 - Who is the ultimate arbiter of events?  Do you see yourself as the master of your own destiny or do you see your destiny within the context of God at work?

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‘Obey the President’ just doesn’t carry the same ring as ‘Obey the king’.  The whole idea of a king is foreign to us as citizens of the United States.  If you are a citizen of the United States, you have never sworn an oath to obey the President.  The President’s word is not supreme.  You can ask him ‘What are you doing’?  We have a tradition of ‘civil disobedience’ where it is culturally acceptable to disobey the President.  We can even remove the President from his office without bloody revolution.

This was not the case for the Teacher.  He was king.  His word was supreme and that word was the law.  What he said went, regardless.  As a subject, you swore an oath to obey the king when he was crowned and that oath was binding until the day the king died.  You had no say in what the king said or did without putting your life, the lives of your family and everything that you owned at risk.  You couldn’t even ask ‘What are you doing’ without that same risk.  Your life, the lives of your family and all that you owned were the king’s to do with as he pleased.

There are several themes and ideas that are repeated in these verses.  As you study, go back and look at where these themes and ideas were introduce and subsequently discussed and then keep in mind what the Teacher was saying in those verses and apply what he has said to what he is teaching here.

Questions:

1. 8:1-8 - What are the reasons to obey the king the Teacher gives us in these verses?  What does the Teacher tell us about relationship to the king?
2. How does the idea that there is a proper time and procedure for every matter impact our obedience to the king?  Who is scheduling the appointments even for the king?
3. What are the choices that can be made in these verses?  When and where do our options lay when it comes to obeying the king?
4. 8:9-15 - What does the Teacher specifically label as meaningless in these verses?  What do they tell you about the perceptions of power and authority?  What do they tell you of the reality of power and authority?  Does the Teacher have any conclusions as to the uses of power and authority?
5. 8:16-17 - The Teacher returns to the relationship between the work of man and the work of God.  What are his conclusions here?  What did he see when he observed man’s labor on the earth?  Are there any practical applications that you can take from the Teacher?
6. What is your attitude towards authority?  Does that attitude differ when you are the one under authority and when you are the one exercising authority?
7. What is your attitude towards the Ultimate Authority?  How is that attitude towards authority reflected in your day-to-day behavior?  Are there areas of your life where you pay God ‘lip-service’ yet ignore Him when it comes down to actual obedience?  Is so, what do you plan to do about it?

One of the themes that we have been dealing with up to this point is the work of man.  Of what use and purpose is that work?  Now we turn to consider the work of God and our relationship to that work.
Several of the ideas the Teacher deals with in these verses were introduced back in chapter 1, specifically vv.15-18.

In vv.16 & 17, the Teacher talks about being ‘overrighteous’, ‘overwise’ and ‘overwicked’.  The word that the NIV translates as over is the same word that we saw in 7:11 where wisdom and inheritance are a benefit, an advantage, with the implication being that being overrighteous, overwise and overwicked is to take advantage of our righteousness, wisdom or wickedness in a way that God did not intend.

Questions:

1. Who can straighten what God has made crooked?  Is mankind in a position to judge the work of God and say ‘I don’t like this crooked thing, it really should be straight’?  Once having made that judgment, can you actually straighten out what it is that you think is crooked?
2. 7:14 - Who is in control of the times?  Do you have any real control over whether the times are good or the times are bad?  What are your options, regardless of what you think that the conditions of the times are?
3. What is your attitude towards the times and circumstances of your life?  Do you see them as something that you need to change or do you see them as something God has given to you to consider?
4. Why would God make it so that we cannot discover anything about our future?  How are some of the ways in which man goes about trying to discover that future?  Is discovering your future important to you?  If so, why?
5. 7:15 - What is the Teacher’s evaluation of his own life?
6. Would you consider a righteous man dying in his righteousness and a wicked man living long in his wickedness straight or crooked?  A sign of good times or bad times?
7. How would being ‘overrighteous’ and/or ‘overwise’ lead to one’s being destroyed?  How would being ‘overwicked’ and/or a fool lead to dying before one’s time?
8. 7:18 - What is the Teacher’s answer?  Does man seem to naturally tend toward wisdom or foolishness?  Righteousness or wickedness?  How does the fear of God impact how we see wisdom and foolishness?  Righteousness and wickedness?
9. 7:19 - How does the wisdom that makes one wise man more powerful than ten rulers in a city?  How does this wisdom differ from that of the ‘overwise’?
10. Have you ever known a truly wise person?  How does what they say to you differ from that of the ‘overwise’, the know-it-alls who seek to give you the benefit of their wisdom?
11. 7:20 - Do you agree with the Teacher?  Are you a sinner?  Have you dealt with your sin?  What is your attitude towards that sin?  How do you deal with that sin when you are confronted with it?
12. 7:21,22 - How sensitive are you to the words of others?  How many times have you said the very same thing about someone else?
13. 7:23-26 - The Teacher’s reaction to all of this was to plunge in and wisely figure it all out.  What did he discover in vv.23b-24?  Where did he turn next (v.25)?  Where did he ultimately end up (v.26)?  What is the Teacher’s judgment on his own motives?
14. 7:29 - How did God make man?  What does the Teacher identify as the fundamental problem?  What are the ‘schemes’ that man has thought up to provide for his own righteousness?  What are the schemes that you have used to provide for your own righteousness?  Are these schemes necessary?
15. 8:1 - Wisdom brightens a man’s face and changes its hard appearance.  Given what the Teacher has said in these verses, what do you think the difference between the ‘wisdom’ that lead the Teacher to the trap and snare of v.26 and the wisdom that leads to the brightening of his face?
16. Are you chasing wisdom?  How are you going about that chase?  Are you trying to find and understand the ultimate effects and causes of wisdom, wickedness and folly or are you seeking the wisdom that God has in His Hand ready to reveal to you?  Are you ready to be satisfied with that wisdom, whatever it may be?

The heart gets mentioned five times in today’s passage, in vv. 2, 3, twice in v.4 & in v.7.  This same word gets translated as ‘mind’ in 2:2 (”…my mind still guiding me with wisdom…” NIV) and 2:23 (”…even at night his mind does not rest…” NIV).

The ancients saw the heart as the seat of thought, the place where the ‘inner self’ resided.  The heart was where one pondered, contemplated and put two in two together in order to see what it looks like.  Our culture tends to see the heart as the seat of emotion, where one feels, rather than thinks.

One of the themes that we noticed studying through this passage is the idea of long-term vs. short-term.  Many of the ideas and concepts that the Teacher contrasts and asks us to think about deal with this whole idea of short-term, immediate gratification vs. a long-term approach, which in turn suggested the whole idea God setting the ‘eternal’ in every man’s heart (3:11) and the conflict we have with it.

A second, related theme is that of beginnings and endings.

Questions:

1. 7:1 - What is a ‘good name’?  What does it mean if someone has a ‘good name’?  How does anyone go about getting a ‘good name’?  Why would that good name be better than Chanel No.5?
2. Which do you think is better, the day of death or the day of birth?  What does each bring?  How do each impact family and friends?  What is the impact on the specific individual concerned?
3. Why would the Teacher think that the day of death better than the day birth?
4. 7:2 - What is it about the fact that death is the destiny of everyone that makes going to a house of mourning better than going to a house of feasting?  What is about this fact that needs to be ‘taken to heart’?
5. 7:3 - How is a sad face good for the heart?  The NASB translates this phrase ‘when a face is sad a heart may be happy’.  What makes a face sad?  What makes a heart (the seat of thought, not emotion) happy?
6. 7:4 - What is a house of mourning?  What is a house of pleasure?  How are they different?  How are they the same?  Why would the heart of a wise man be in the house of mourning and the heart of a fool in the house of pleasure?  What would one think about if you were in the house of mourning?  The house of pleasure?
7. What do you think about?  In which house does your mind/heart reside?
8. 7:5 - What is behind the rebuke of a wise man?  What would be a wise man’s purpose in delivering a rebuke to anyone?  What is the fool’s purpose in singing his song?  Which one is going to have more substance?
9. Most people do not like being rebuked.  Why don’t you like being rebuked or corrected?  Do you listen to a rebuke?  Why or why not?  Have you ever been rebuked by a wise man?  Did you listen?  What was the result?
10. 7:8 - What is it about extortion that can turn a wise man into a fool?  Why does a bribe corrupt the mind/heart?  What is the attraction of either?
11. 7:9 - Are you quickly provoked?  Are you looking for a reason to get angry?  Does anger ‘sit on your lap’ and lash out at anything and anyone who passes by?  What does anger accomplish?  Are its consequences constructive or destructive?  How would your family, friends and co-workers answer these questions about you?
12. 7:11 - How are wisdom and an inheritance alike?  How is wisdom gained?  How is an inheritance put together?  What is the mind-set behind either?  What makes them both ‘good things’?
13. How does wisdom preserve the life of its possessor?  What about wisdom makes it a ‘life saver’?
14. Where does your heart reside?  Do you think about the next pleasure, the next whiff of perfume or fool who is going to sing and make you feel good about yourself or are you focused on the eternal?

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The word ‘appetite’ is used twice (vv.7,9) in these verses.  The same Hebrew word translated here as ‘appetite’ is used many, many times in the Old Testament and is translated as ‘life’ 129 times and as ‘soul’ 105 times.  The contexts of it’s use range from the Jacob speaking of how his life was spared when he saw God face to face (Genesis 32:30) to the Law (Exodus 21:23) to Hannah pouring out her soul to the Lord (1 Samuel 1:15) to most anytime seeking the Lord with all your heart and soul is spoken of (Deuteronomy 4:29; 2 Kings 23:3; 1 Chronicle 22:19).
I would suggest that the translation here as ‘appetite’ implies one’s life or soul ‘on the hunt’ for satisfaction in much the same way as when our physical hunger flairs up and seeks satisfaction.
There are also repeated themes and questions in these verses, ideas that the Teacher has addressed before.  What was he talking about the first time through and how does that apply to what he is trying to teach us here?
Questions:

1. Why would God give a man wealth, possessions and honor (v.1) and yet not enable that man to enjoy them?  Is the issue God or with the man?  (Refer back to 5:19)
2. Why is a stranger enjoying that wealth and possessions a grievous evil?
3. Do wealth, possession and honor have value in themselves?  Why or why not?
4. What is the Teacher contrasting in vv. 3-6?  What are the qualities of the rich man and the stillborn child?  Which does the Teacher tells us is better off and why?
5. What does the Teacher seem to be telling us one of the keys to life is?  What does the stillborn child have that the rich man who has everything lacks?  What is it that they have in common?
6. How can all of man’s efforts be for his mouth and yet his appetite not be satisfied?
7. Does it matter how wise or foolish one is if his efforts are misdirected, if he is trying to satisfy an appetite with the wrong stuff?
8. What is the Teacher’s answer in v.9?  What does your eye see?  How does that contrast with the ‘roving of the appetite’?
9. What is your ‘appetite’?  What do you seek that will satisfy you?  Are you content with what you have, what your ‘eye sees’ or does your appetite go ‘on the hunt’, roving for something that will surely satisfy it this time?
10. Can you identify what it is that you are chasing in order to achieve some kind of satisfaction?  Do you ever catch it and if you do, does it truly satisfy or does it lead to more chasing?
11. Can you look back over chapters five and six and come to some kind of conclusion as to what the key factor that distinguishes those who find satisfaction and those whose appetites continue to seek for it?
12. Are you really any different in this aspect of your life than anyone else?  What exists has already been named and what man is has already been known.  If you continue to seek after that unfound and unnamed something that will finally satisfy you, what do these verses say about your chances of finding it and it truly being satisfactory?
13. Who are you really contending with in that struggle to find satisfaction?  How many words do you use to cover up the nature of that struggle?  Do all those words really make any difference in the long run?
14. How would you answer the two questions in v.12?

A few observations:  1) the subject of oppression is again brought up with the king himself profiting 2) the word used for the sleep of the laborer carries the implication of rest and differs from the word used for the sleep denied the rich man 3) The idea that there is nothing better for a man than to eat, drink and find satisfaction in his work is repeated again as is 4) the idea that man has a lot assigned to him and it is a gift from God to be able to accept and enjoy it 5) verses 8 and 9 are especially challenging both textually and culturally
Questions:

1. Why shouldn’t we be surprised or shocked when we see justice and rights being denied?  What are the implications that the official we see doing the oppressing is supervised by higher officials and they by those higher still?
2. What is the Teacher (a.k.a. king in Jerusalem) is trying to tell us when he says that the king himself ‘profits from the fields’?
3. Why is the one who loves money and wealth (v.10) never satisfied with the money and income that he does have?  Do you have some understanding of why the Teacher brands this as meaningless?
4. How do goods become items of consumption?  Why is there no benefit to there owner except to ‘feast his eyes on them’ (NIV)?  We are very much a consumer culture.  Do you buy goods just in order to feast your eyes on them?  What is your attitude towards what you buy?  Do you expect them to do more for you than be the goods that they are?
5. Why doesn’t the relative abundance of the laborer get in the way of his sleep?  How does the abundance of the rich man get in the way of his sleep?  How have you been sleeping lately?
6. What is the ‘grievous evil’ the Teacher saw in vv.13-15?
7. What does it mean to hoard?  What is the purpose of hoarding?  How does hoarding wealth harm its owner?  Can a man take what he hoards with him?
8. Compare and contrast the man described in vv.16-17 with the man described in vv.18-20.  What do you see as similarities?  What do you see as differences?  Why does the first man eat in darkness with frustration, affliction and anger?  Why does the second man find satisfaction in what he does?  What seems to be each one’s attitude toward money and wealth?  Is money and wealth evil?