² tn Grk “three hundred denarii.” One denarius was the standard day’s wage, so the value exceeded what a laborer could earn in a year (taking in to account Sabbaths and feast days when no work was done).

³ sn The passive was restored points to healing by God. Now the question became: Would God exercise his power through Jesus, if what Jesus was doing were wrong? Note also Jesus’ “labor.” He simply spoke and it was so.

¹ sn The standard wage was a denarius a day. The denarius was a silver coin worth about a day’s wage for a laborer in Palestine in the 1st century.

² tn Grk “one hundred denarii.” The denarius was a silver coin worth about a day’s wage for a laborer; this would be about three month’s pay.

¹ sn The four drachma coin was a stater (στατήρ, statēr), a silver coin worth four drachmas. One drachma was equivalent to one denarius, the standard pay for a day’s labor (L&N 6.80).

¹ sn The passive was restored points to healing by God. Now the question became: Would God exercise his power through Jesus, if what Jesus was doing were wrong? Note also Jesus’ “labor.” He simply spoke and it was so.

¹ tn The text is difficult. Word by word the MT has, “young men hand mill (?) they take up.” Perhaps it means, “they take [our] young men for mill grinding,” or perhaps it means, “the young men take up [the labor of] mill grinding.” This expression is an example of synecdoche, where the mill stands for the labor at the mill, and then that labor stands for performing menial physical labor as servants. The surface reading, “young men carry hand mills,” does not portray any great adversity for them. The Vulgate translates as an abusive sexual metaphor (see D. R. Hillers, Lamentations [AB], 99), but this gives no known parallel to the second part of the verse.

² tn This line may be interpreted in one of three ways: (1) “the labor of fools wearies him because he did not know enough to go to a town,” referring to the labor of the peasants who had not been able to find a place in town where life was easier; (2) “the labor of the fools so wearies everyone of them (singular pronoun taken in a distributive sense) so much that he even does not know how to go to town,” that is, he does not even know how to do the easiest thing in the world; (3) “let the labor of fools so weary him that he may not even know how to go to town,” taking the verb as a jussive, describing the foolish man described in 10:12-14. See D. Barthélemy, ed., Preliminary and Interim Report on the Hebrew Old Testament Text Project, 3:592-93.

² sn The phrase “to eat and to drink” is a common idiom in Ecclesiastes for a person enjoying the fruit of his labor (e.g., 2:24; 3:13).

¹ tn The phrase “the fruit of” does not appear in the Hebrew text, but is supplied in the translation for clarity (see the following note on the phrase “hard labor”).

² tn Heb “and all the toil with which I had toiled in doing it.” The term עָמַל (ʿamal, “toil”) is repeated to emphasize the burden and weariness of the labor which Qoheleth exerted in his accomplishments.

¹ sn This part of the proverb shows the proper interplay between human labor and divine provision. It teaches people to take care of what they have because it will not last forever.

¹ sn If the inheritance is obtained quickly, it could mean prematurely (e.g., Luke 15:12) or cruelly (Prov 19:26). The inheritance is gained without labor or without preparation.

² tn Heb “word of lips.” This construct phrase features a genitive of source (“a word from the lips”) or a subjective genitive (“speaking a word”). Talk without work (which produces nothing) is contrasted with labor that produces something.

⁴ tn The term מַס (mas) refers to forced or conscripted labor and is sometimes translated as “slave labor” (NIV, cf. NLT “slave”) but it is far from clear that it means slavery (see NIDOTTE 984 s.v.). The term certainly describes imposed work requirements. For Israelites within Israel it is elsewhere used only in connection to conscription to work on royal building projects making it like a form of taxation (forced labor has often been used in world history as taxation instead of money). The precise use of the term here is unclear because of general lack of information, but perhaps the lazy person will not earn enough money to meet obligations and be required to pay via forced labor.

¹ tn This is not the common verb for being born (Niphal of יָלַד, yalad). The nuance of חוֹלָלְתִּי (kholalti, the Polal of חִיל, [khil]) emphasizes being birthed through labor pains.

³ tn There is some debate over the meaning of בְּעָלֶיהָ (b^eʿaleha), usually translated “its owners.” Dahood, following others (although without their emendations), thought it referred to “laborers” (see M. Dahood, Bib 41 [1960]: 303; idem, Bib 43 [1962]: 362).

¹ tn Heb “their sons who were left after them in the land, whom the sons of Israel were unable to wipe out, and Solomon raised them up for a crew of labor to this day.”

² tn A “resident who stays” would be a foreign person who was probably residing as another kind of laborer in the household of a landowner (B. A. Levine, Leviticus [JPSTC], 170-71). See v. 35 below.

² tn The imperfect tense has traditionally been rendered as a commandment, “you will labor.” But the point of this commandment is the prohibition of work on the seventh day. The permission nuance of the imperfect works well here.