3 ¶ If a man beget an hundred children, and live many years, so that the days of his years be many, and his soul be not filled with good, and also that he have no burial; I say, that an untimely birth is better than he.
Suppose one were to beget a hundred children, and he should have many years, yes, many indeed may be the days of his years, and his soul not satisfied with good, and he have no burial,——I should say, that better off than such an one is an abortion.
(3.) If is caused to beget a man (again איש, ‘should one beget’) a hundred (children is to be supplied, but not prominently; begetting is used in its widest sense), and years many (plural, equivalent to ‘years, and many of them’) should live, and many (singular) which they are the days of his years (‘and the days of his years should be ever so many,’ his life being expressed both in days and years to give strong prominence to the fact of its duration), and his soul not satisfied from out of the good (the abstract with the article, hence equivalent to our ‘good,’ standing alone), and moreover burial (the abstract of the past participle, used, of course, as the place of burial——see Genesis xxxv. 20, xlvii. 30, but with a shade of difference from קבר——compare Genesis xlvii. 30 with Genesis l. 5, for here, too, we notice that קבורה is written full), is not to be to him (emphatic. To have no burial, no one to lament him or erect a tomb over him——to be worse off than Jehoiakim, Jeremiah xxii. 19, who had the burial of an ass——is such a terrible failure to a man who had possessed a hundred children, of whom some at least might have shown him this last honour, that it may well be cited as an instance of failure of human felicity), I say a good better than his (emphatic) is the abortion (i.e. that abortion is a better lot).
4 For he cometh in with vanity, and departeth in darkness, and his name shall be covered with darkness.
5 Moreover he hath not seen the sun, nor known any thing: this hath more rest than the other.
For in evanescence it begins, and in darkness departs, and its name in that darkness is concealed; IT has not seen light; HE has not known rest; the one is no better than the other.
(4, 5.) For in vanity he comes, and in darkness he goes, and in darkness (repeated, equivalent, therefore, to ‘in that darkness’) his name is covered; moreover the sun not seen (which is the lot of the abortion), and not knowing rest (the lot of the person here spoken of), to this there is no more than that. The Masorets, however, by their accentuation, show that they understood the verse somewhat differently. They render, ‘a sun he does not see and does not know; the rest of this is more than that;’ but this rendering is obscure and clumsy, and makes the words ‘does not know’ superfluous, besides interrupting the argument. The LXX. render verbatim: καίγε ἥλιον οὐκ εἶδεν καὶ οὐκ ἔγνω ἀναπαύσεις τούτῳ ὑπὲρ τοῦτον, which is clear enough with the Hebrew before us, but is quite unintelligible without it, hence the text has been attempted to be amended in various ways (see Stier and Theile’s Polyglot).