Ecclesiastes 7:25

But I decided to investigate things and by my wisdom try to understand the reason for everything. I also wanted to understand why people act wickedly and why they act very foolishly.

Translation for Translators

In The King James Version

I applied mine heart to know, and to search, and to seek out wisdom, and the reason of things, and to know the wickedness of folly, even of foolishness and madness:

In Context

24Wisdom seems to be far from me; there is no one [RHQ] who can truly understand everything.

26One thing I learned was that ◄allowing a woman to seduce you/having sex with a woman to whom you are not married► is worse than dying. A woman who tries to seduce men is as dangerous as a trap [MET]. If you allow her to put her arms around you, it will be as though she will be fastening you with chains. Women like that will capture sinful men, but men who please God will escape from such women.

Read all of Ecclesiastes 7

Cross References

Joshua 7:13“Now go and tell this to the people: ‘Tomorrow you must perform the rituals that will cause yourselves to become acceptable to Yahweh again. Yahweh, the God whom we Israelis worship, says that one of you has kept things that he told you to destroy. You will never defeat your enemies until you get rid of those things.

Proverbs 17:12A mother bear whose cubs have been taken away from her is dangerous, but it is more dangerous to confront a foolish person who is doing something foolish.

Ecclesiastes 1:13By being wise, I concentrated on understanding everything that was being done on the earth [MTY]. But I found out that God causes all of us to experience things that cause us to be unhappy/miserable.

Ecclesiastes 2:1Then I said to myself, “Okay, I will try to do everything that I enjoy. I will find out whether doing what I enjoy can truly enable me to be happy.” But I found out that doing that was also useless/senseless.

Ecclesiastes 2:15So I said to myself, “I am very wise, but I will die at the end of my life, like foolish people do. So ◄how has it benefited me to be very wise?/it certainly has not benefited me to be very wise [RHQ]►. I do not understand why people consider that it is valuable to be wise.

Ecclesiastes 3:16Furthermore, I saw that on this earth [MTY], even in the courts where we expect judges to make right decisions about what people had done, they did many wicked [DOU] things.

Matthew Henry on Ecclesiastes 7:24-29

The Evil of Sin. 23 All this have I proved by wisdom: I said, I will be wise; but it was far from me. 24 That which is far off, and exceeding deep, who can find it out? 25 I applied mine heart to know, and to search, and to seek out wisdom, and the reason of things, and to know the wickedness of folly, even of foolishness and madness: 26 And I find more bitter than death the woman, whose heart is snares and nets, and her hands as bands: whoso pleaseth God shall escape from her; but the sinner shall be taken by… Read the whole commentary →

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