Ecclesiastes 4:13

"Better is a poor but wise youth, than an old and foolish king who no longer knows how to take care of himself; because from the prison-house he emerged to reign, while even in his reign he was born poor. I saw all the living that wander beneath the sun throng to the succeeding youth that steps into his place. There is no end to the entire nation, to all that was before them; similarly the ones that come later will not rejoice in him. For this too is futility and a vexation of the spirit." Symmachus translates this passage in this way: "better a poor man who has wisdom, than an old and foolish king who does not know to beware of change". For the one leaves the body to reign in heaven, and the other indeed, although he had been born a king, is restricted by poverty. I saw all men living, who grow up under the sun in propitious adolescence, which increases in them. Each and every nation that was before is unending, and those that come after do not rejoice in the previous. But this too is empty and a vexation of the spirit. My Hebrew tutor, whose teachings I often refer to, bore witness while he was reading Ecclesiastes with me, that Bar Akiba wrote these things above the present passage, and he is greatly admired by other scholars: better is the inner part of man, which arises in us after the fourteenth year of puberty, than the outer, physical man, who is born from his mother's womb, and he does not know how to abstain from vice because it comes to this that he rules over his vices from the house of chains, that is from his mother's womb. For he is made poor because of his power and by carrying out all wicked deeds. I saw those men, who lived as those former men, and were changed afterwards into that second man, in him that has been born in place of the former. And I understood that all men sinned in that prior manhood, before the second is born, when they become two men. But once these men have changed for the better, and after the learning of philosophers, they leave the left path and hurry towards the right, and they follow the second man, that is the newest man, and do not rejoice in him that is the former. The apostle agrees with these two types of men [Cfr Rom, 7, 15.] and Leviticus also mentioned them: "Man, man" [Cfr Lev. 17, 13; 19, 20; 21, 17. etc.] who desired this or that. That saintly man Gregorius Pontus the bishop, to whom Origen preached,…