This is the evil in everything done beneath the sun that all have one fate."[1] In this life, divorced from all moral restraints, is a pessimism which surpasses that of Greek or Roman. The sprightly Greek had reserved his melancholy for old age, with its lost vitality and outlook on the grave.
"But when at length the season of youth has vanished behind us,
Then to have perished at once truly were better than life,"
says Simonides; and even the gloomy Tacitus, when, at the opening of his Histories, he declared that "never by more ruinous disasters of the Roman people had it been proved that the gods care nothing for our safety but only for taking vengeance on us," admitted the existence of avenging deities, and shrank from the moral nihilism which Qôheleth avows. No wonder the Oriental pessimist finds the life of man altogether insufferable, and envies the blessings of the unborn: "So I praised the dead who long since died more than the living who are yet alive, but better than either of these I praised him who has never been, who has never seen the evil deeds which are done beneath the sun."[2]
Qôheleth thus takes us some way on one of the two streams which part from Ezekiel downwards—the stream of Hebrew melancholy which the unhappy times of Antiochus did so much to increase. The study of early Hebrew literature, fostered by the hope of national independence and the gradual alteration of popular speech into Aramaic, had produced a literate class which soon lost the idea of literary creation in a minute verbal study aimed at nothing higher than the interpretation of the Tôrah, or Law. In Ezekiel the Hebrew idea of literature had reached its widest circumference; it was then no longer circumscribed by the narrow limits of the priestly
