Note 336 — Chapter VI · KOHELETH’S ‘PORTRAIT OF OLD AGE;’ THE EPILOGUE, ITS NATURE AND ORIGIN.

So Klostermann, regarding this verse down to ‘commandments’ as an additional note on this difficult saying of Koheleth’s, which was liable to give offence to orthodox readers. The word ‘(is) vanity’ is supposed to have dropped out of the text. The object of the note is to show under what limitations it can be admitted that ‘all is vanity.’ Then the writer continues, ‘For this (concerns) every man; for every work’ &c., to show that the limiting precept is not less universally applicable than Koheleth’s melancholy formula.