I turned my heart to know and to search out and to seek wisdom and the scheme of things, and to know the wickedness of folly and the foolishness that is madness. And I find something more bitter than death: the woman whose heart is snares and nets, and whose hands are fetters. He who pleases God escapes her, but the sinner is taken by her. Behold, this is what I found, says the Preacher, while adding one thing to another to find the scheme of things— which my soul has sought repeatedly, but I have not found. One man among a thousand I found, but a woman among all these I have not found. See, this alone I found, that God made man upright, but they have sought out many schemes.
As always in Ecclesiastes, we must begin looking at passages like the above via the lens of Solomon’s conclusion of the entire book:
Ecclesiastes 12:13-14 (ESV)
The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man. For God will bring every deed into judgment, with every secret thing, whether good or evil.
Solomon is out to test drive the world and all that the world has to offer. But, based upon the above passage things just don’t seem to add up to him. As he pursues happiness and welfare and peace, the world seems to disappoint. In his pursuit of these things he finds out that he is lead to a woman “whose heart is snares and nets and whose hands are fetters.” We are not told who this woman (women?) are. We are only told that in his pursuit of all that life has to offer he is tripped up by this “woman.” Much as been written about this and this little post won’t do much to clear it all up. But, perhaps this is a similar theme to Solomon’s quest for wisdom in Proverbs 7 where he talks about the naive one seeking wisdom but he meets woman “folly.” The pursuit that Solomon is on in Ecclesiastes is about God’s way verse man’s folly. So, it is not hard to go there. Solomon can be referring to women in general for him, as we know he had countless wives and concubines. He talks about “adding one thing to another” in the above passages. He is pursuing an understanding of life via a mathematical equation approach. He is seeing that, unlike math, life is not that clear and that precise. He talks about the person who “pleases God escapes her.” When we put all this together we can see why his conclusion in chapter 13 was to “fear God and keep His commandments, for this is the whole duty of man.” When he tries to look at life through a rational lens (scheme of things), he finds failure, frustration and fear. Solomon has done the test drive and found out the vehicle is not safe. Instead, follow God, love Him and obey Him. That is the sure mathematical approach.
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