light side, but also a dark side; for wisdom, which accomplished so great a matter, reaped only ingratitude:
Verses 14-15
Ecc 9:14-15 “A little city, and men therein only a few, - to which a great king came near, and he besieged it, and erected against it high bulwarks. And he met therein a poor wise man, and who saved the city by his wisdom; and no man thought of that poor man.” What may be said as to the hist. reference of these words has already been noticed. The “great king” is probably an Asiatic monarch, and that the Persian; Jerome translates verbally: Civitas parva et pauci in ea viri, venit contra eam - the former is the subj., and the latter its pred.; the object stands first, plastically rigid, and there then follows what happened to it; the structure of the sentence is fundamentally the same as Psa 104:25. The expression אל בּוא, which may be used of any kind of coming to anything, is here, as at Gen 32:9, meant of a hostile approach. The object of a siege and a hostile attack is usually denoted by על, 2Ki 16:5; Isa 7:1. Two Codd. of de Rossi's have the word מצורים, but that is an error of transcription; the plur. of מצור is fem., Isa 29:4. מצודים is, as at Ecc 7:26, plur. of מצוד (from צוּד, to lie in wait); here, as elsewhere, בּחן and דּיק is the siege-tower erected on the ground or on the rampart, from which to spy out the weak points of the beleaguered place so as to assail it.
The words following בהּ וּמצא are rendered by the Targ., Syr., Jerome, Arab., and Luther: “and there was found in it;” most interpreters explain accordingly, as they point to Ecc 1:10, יאמר, dicat aliquis. But that מץ taht in this sequence of thought is = ונמצא (Job 42:15), is only to be supposed if it were impossible to regard the king as the subject, which Ewald with the lxx and the Venet. does in spite of §294b. It is true it would not be possible if, as Vaih. remarks, the finding presupposed a searching; but cf. on the contrary, e.g., Deu 24:1; Psa 116:3. We also say of one whom, contrary to expectation, a superior meets with, that he has found his match, that he has found his man. Thus it is here said of the great king, he found in the city a poor wise man - met therein with such an one, against whom his plan was shattered. חכם is the adjective of the person of the poor man designated by ish miskēn (cf. 2Ch 2:13); the accents correctly indicate this relation. Instead of וּמלּט־הוּא, the older language would use וימלּט; it does not, like the author here, use pure perfects, but makes the chief factum prominent by the fut. consec. The ē of millēt is that of limmēd before Makkeph, referred back to the original a. The making prominent of the subject contained in millat by means of hu is favourable to the
