Ecclesiastes 1:13
And pI gave my heart to seek and search out by wisdom concerning all things that are done under heaven: qthis *sore *travail hath God given to the sons of man 3to be exercised therewith.
And I gave my heart to seek and search out by wisdom concerning all things that are done under heaven: this sore travail hath God given to the sons of man to be exercised therewith.
p:
Ecclesiastes 1:17 And I gave my heart to know wisdom, and to know madness and folly: I perceived that this also is vexation of spirit.
Proverbs 2:3 Yea, if thou criest after knowledge, and liftest up thy voice for understanding;
Proverbs 2:4 If thou seekest her as silver, and searchest for her as for hid treasures;
Proverbs 4:7 Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom: and with all thy getting get understanding.
Ephesians 5:15 See then that ye walk circumspectly, not as fools, but as wise,
1 Kings 4:33 And he spake of trees, from the cedar tree that is in Lebanon even unto the hyssop that springeth out of the wall: he spake also of beasts, and of fowl, and of creeping things, and of fishes.
Psalms 111:2 The works of the LORD are great, sought out of all them that have pleasure therein.
q:
Genesis 3:19 In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.
Ecclesiastes 3:10 I have seen the travail, which God hath given to the sons of men to be exercised in it.
*:
sore-very great or severe.
*:
travail-distress, trouble.
3:
Or, to afflict them.
which phrase notes his serious and fixed purpose, his great industry and alacrity in it,
to seek diligently and accurately, by wisdom, wisely, or by the help of that wisdom wherewith God had endowed me, concerning all things that are done under heaven; concerning all the works of God and men in this lower world; the works of nature, and their causes, effects, properties, and operations; the works of Divine providence, and God’s counsels and ends in them; the work and depths of human policy in the conduct of personal, and domestical, and public affairs.
this difficult and toilsome work of searching out these things,
God hath inflicted this as a just punishment upon man for his eating of the tree of knowledge, that instead of that sweet and perfect knowledge which God had freely infused into man at his first creation, he should now grope after some small parcels or fragments of it, and those too not to be gotten without the sweat of his brows and brains.
to employ themselves in the painful study of these things, which now is both their duty and their punishment. Or, as it is rendered in the margin, and by many others, to afflict them in or by it, to chastise their former curiosity, and to give them matter of continual humiliation and vexation. And therefore knowledge is so far from making men happy, that it exposeth them to trouble and infelicity.