What is the context?
The Teacher turns again to wisdom and folly and grants a real difference between them: wisdom is like light compared with darkness.
Yet both the wise person and the fool die. Wisdom can guide a life without defeating the common fate that brings the experiment to an end.
The loss of lasting remembrance intensifies the question of gain. The Teacher’s statement that he hated life gives voice to the anguish this conclusion produces.
This is honest lament within the inquiry, not a command for the reader to seek death or a claim that a grieving person has ceased to matter.
How is this passage commonly understood?
Wesley preserves the usefulness of wisdom while acknowledging that it cannot by itself give the lasting happiness sought here. He understands the hated life as a life experienced as a burden. The argument should not be shortened into a claim that wise and foolish conduct are morally identical.
Where does this fit in God's plan?
1 Corinthians 15:50–58 develops the wider Christian answer through resurrection and the defeat of death in Jesus Christ. Paul consequently says labor in the Lord is not in vain. He does not directly quote this paragraph, and his answer should not erase the Teacher’s honest encounter with mortality.
What is our position?
We don't have a position on this passage yet. When our study reaches a conclusion the text supports, it will appear here.
Where can I study this further?
No deeper study linked yet.