The Preacher opens with a warning about how to approach God. Keep your foot, that is, be careful, when you go to the house of God. Be more ready to hear than to offer the sacrifice of fools, who do not even realize they are doing evil. Don't be rash with your mouth or hasty to say anything before God: God is in heaven and you are on earth, so let your words be few. Just as too much business breeds confused dreams, a fool is known by the multitude of his words.
On the matter of vows: when you make a vow to God, pay it without delay. God has no pleasure in fools. Better not to vow at all than to vow and not follow through. Do not let your mouth cause you to sin, and don't tell the angel afterward that it was a mistake: why should God be angry at your voice and destroy the work of your hands? Among many dreams and many words there are also many vanities. The conclusion is simple: fear God.
The Preacher then turns to something that might trouble the reader: the oppression of the poor and the perverting of justice in a province. His counsel is not to be shocked by it. There is one higher than the highest who watches, and there are higher ones above them. And even the king is served by the field: the whole hierarchy rests on the earth and those who work it.
Now to money. He that loves silver will not be satisfied with silver, nor he that loves abundance with increase. When goods increase, so do those who consume them, and what does the owner gain except to look at them with his eyes? The sleep of the laboring man is sweet, whether he eats little or much. But the abundance of the rich will not let him sleep.
There is a sore evil the Preacher has seen: riches hoarded to the owner's own hurt. Those riches perish through misfortune, and he leaves his son with nothing in his hand. As a man came naked from his mother's womb, so he returns; he takes nothing from his labor. He labored for the wind. All his days he eats in darkness, with much sorrow and wrath alongside his sickness.
But here is what the Preacher has seen that is good: it is fitting for a man to eat, drink, and find enjoyment in all his labor under the sun, all the days God gives him, for that is his portion. And when God gives a man wealth and also gives him power to eat of it, to take his portion and rejoice in his labor; that is the gift of God. Such a man will not dwell much on the days of his life, because God keeps him occupied with the joy of his heart.
Coming Up in Chapter 6
The Teacher has observed something troubling that happens to many people - a cruel irony about wealth and satisfaction that reveals how life can play tricks on even those who seem to have everything The Preacher names a common evil he has seen under the sun: a man to whom God gives riches, wealth, and honor, so that he lacks nothing his soul desires.
