Eclesiastés 5

¹Guard your step when you go to the house of God. Let your approach be obedience, rather than the fools' offering of sacrifice; for they know not how to keep from doing evil.

²Be not hasty in your utterance and let not your heart be quick to make a promise in God's presence. God is in heaven and you are on earth; therefore let your words be few.

³For nightmares come with many cares, and a fool's utterance with many words.

⁴When you make a vow to God, delay not its fulfillment. For God has no pleasure in fools; fulfill what you have vowed.

⁵You had better not make a vow than make it and not fulfill it.

⁶Let not your utterances make you guilty, and say not before his representative, It was a mistake, lest God be angered by such words and destroy the works of your hands.

⁷Rather, fear God!

⁸If you see oppression of the poor, and violation of rights and justice in the realm, do not be shocked by the fact, for the high official has another higher than he watching him and above these are others higher still--.

⁹Yet an advantage for a country in every respect is a king for the arable land.

¹⁰The covetous man is never satisfied with money, and the lover of wealth reaps no fruit from it; so this too is vanity.

¹¹Where there are great riches, there are also many to devour them. Of what use are they to the owner except to feast his eyes upon?

¹²Sleep is sweet to the laboring man, whether he eats little or much, but the rich man's abundance allows him no sleep.

¹³This is a grievous evil which I have seen under the sun: riches kept by their owner to his hurt.

¹⁴Should the riches be lost through some misfortune, he may have a son when he is without means.

¹⁵As he came forth from his mother's womb, so again shall he depart, naked as he came, having nothing from his labor that he can carry in his hand.

¹⁶This too is a grievous evil, that he goes just as he came. What then does it profit him to toil for wind?

¹⁷All the days of his life are passed in gloom and sorrow, under great vexation, sickness and wrath.

¹⁸Here is what I recognize as good: it is well for a man to eat and drink and enjoy all the fruits of his labor under the sun during the limited days of the life which God gives him; for this is his lot.

¹⁹Any man to whom God gives riches and property, and grants power to partake of them, so that he receives his lot and finds joy in the fruits of his toil, has a gift from God.

²⁰For he will hardly dwell on the shortness of his life, because God lets him busy himself with the joy of his heart.