always desires. חסר is adj. in the sense of wanting, lacking, as at 1Sa 21:1-15 :16; 1Ki 11:22; Pro 12:9. לנפשׁו, “for his soul,” i.e., his person, is = the synon. לעצמו found in the later usage of the language; מן (different from the min, Ecc 4:8) is, as at Gen 6:2, partitive. The נכרי, to whom this considerable estate, satisfying every wish, finally comes, is certainly not the legal heir (for that he enters into possession, in spite of the uncertainty of his moral character, Ecc 2:19, would be in itself nothing less than a misfortune, yet perfectly in order, Ecc 5:13 [14]), but some stranger without any just claim, not directly a foreigner (Heiligst.), but, as Burger explains: talis qui proprie nullum habet jus in bona ejus cui נכרי dicitur (cf. נכריּה of the unmarried wife in the Book of Proverbs).
That wealth without enjoyment is nothing but vanity and an evil disease, the author now shows by introducing another historical figure, and thereby showing that life without enjoyment is worse than never to have come into existence at all:
Verse 3
Ecc 6:3 “If a man begat an hundred, and lived many years, and the amount of the days of his years was great, and his soul satisfied not itself in good, and also he had no grave, then I say: Better than he is the untimely birth.” The accentuation of 3a is like that of 2a. The disjunctives follow the Athnach, as at 2Ki 23:13, only that there Telisha Gedhola stands for Pazer. Hitzig finds difficulty with the clause לו ... וגם־, and regards it as a marginal gloss to 5a, taken up into the text at a wrong place. But just the unexpected form and the accidental nature, more than the inward necessity of this feature in the figure, leads us to conclude that the author here connects together historical facts, as conjecturally noted above, into one fanciful picture. מאה is obviously to be supplemented by (ובנות) בנים; the Targ. and Midrash make this man to be Cain, Ahab, Haman, and show at least in this that they extend down into the time of the Persian kingdom a spark of historical intelligence. שׁן רבּ interchanges with שׁן הר, Ecc 11:8, as at Neh 11:30. In order to designate the long life emphatically, the author expresses the years particularly in days: “and if it is much which (Heiligst.: multum est quod) the days of his years amount to;” cf. ימי ויּהיוּ, in Gen 5. With venaphsho there follows the reverse side of this long life with many children: (1) his soul satisfies not itself, i.e., has no self-satisfying enjoyment of the good (min, as at Psa 104:13, etc.), i.e., of all the good things which he possesses, - in a word, he is not happy in his life; and (2) an honourable burial is not granted to him, but קב חם, Jer 22:19, which is the contrary of a burial such as becomes a man (the body of Artaxerxes Ochus
