Ecclesiastes 9:13 Commentary and Bible Study

In verses 13-18 Solomon reflects on an incident which struck him as very remarkable, an example of wisdom in action bringing very obvious benefits. There was a city which had no great defences and few within its walls who could resist an aggressor. It was attacked by a strong king who had vastly superior forces so that the situation looked hopeless and the city seemed bound to fall. The king built a siege against its wall and it was clear that it could only hold out a short time before the people inside were forced to surrender. Nevertheless, surprisingly, the city did not fall and its deliverance came from an unlikely quarter. There was a poor man within the city who nobody regarded as noteworthy but whose wisdom delivered the city by a plan, that no one else was able to think of. As a result the city was saved and the stronger king was deprived of victory. The measure of the poor man’s wisdom was the greatness of the reversal which it accomplished. We have in Scripture an example of a similar event in 2 Samuel 20:15-22.Clearly this was something which deserved to be recognised and the inhabitants of the city should have richly rewarded this poor man to whom they owed their lives. But in fact, he was not honoured and his deliverance of the city was completely forgotten. Although no one else had been able to find a solution and this poor man’s wisdom was the sole reason that their city and their lives had been spared, they let what he had done slip entirely from the minds, and forgot the poor man and his wisdom. There were two equally remarkable things about this event: the wisdom of one, obscure, poor man that brought such an unlikely deliverance to the city, and the way in which the entire population forgot how their lives had been spared through what this poor man had done and the debt they owed him. From this situation Solomon draws lessons which relate to his present subject.