ruddy i.e. a human being (an individual or the species · noun, common masculine singular absolute
thousand
מֵאֶ֙לֶף֙me.'E.lef
H505
hence (the ox's head being the first letter of the alph… · preposition + cardinal number, both genders singular absolute
found
מָצָ֔אתִיma.Tza.ti
H4672
properly · verb, qal perfect, 1st person common singular
woman
וְאִשָּׁ֥הve.'i.Shah
H802
a woman · conjunction + noun, common feminine singular absolute
found
מָצָֽאתִיma.Tza.ti
H4672
properly · verb, qal perfect, 1st person common singular
Strong's Exhaustive Concordance (James Strong, 1890/1894), public domain; digitized by Open Scriptures (CC BY-SA). KJV word tagging: eBible.org (public domain). Original-language text, parsing and brief lexicon: STEPBible.org data from Tyndale House, Cambridge (CC BY 4.0).
Cross-references
Job 33:23 If there be a messenger with him, an interpreter, one among a thousand, to shew unto man his uprightness:
Psalms 12:1 Help, LORD; for the godly man ceaseth; for the faithful fail from among the children of men.
1 Kings 11:1-3 But king Solomon loved many strange women, together with the daughter of Pharaoh, women of the Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, Zidonians, and…
Ecclesiastes 7:23-24 All this have I proved by wisdom: I said, I will be wise; but it was far from me.
Isaiah 26:9 With my soul have I desired thee in the night; yea, with my spirit within me will I seek thee early: for when thy judgments are in the earth…
Cross-references from OpenBible.info (CC BY), in the lineage of the Treasury of Scripture Knowledge (public domain).
Commentary
Matthew Henry on Ecclesiastes 7:23–end
Solomon had hitherto been proving the vanity of the world and its utter insufficiency to make men happy; now here he comes to show the vileness of sin, and its certain tendency to make men miserable; and this, as the former, he proves from his own experience, and it was a dear-bought experience. He is here, more than any where in all this book, putting on the habit of a penitent. He reviews what he had been discoursing of already, and tells us that what he had said was what he knew and was well assured of, and what he resolved to stand by: All this have I proved by wisdom, Ecc 7:23. Now here,
I. He owns and laments the deficiencies of his wisdom. He had wisdom enough to see the vanity of the…
Rather, referring to his past experience, "Which my soul sought further, but I found not."
one man--that is, worthy of the name, "man," "upright"; not more than one in a thousand of my courtiers (Job 33:23; Psa 12:1). Jesus Christ alone of men fully realizes the perfect ideal of "man." "Chiefest among ten thousand" (Sol 5:10). No perfect "woman" has ever existed, not even the Virgin Mary. Solomon, in the word "thousand," alludes to his three hundred wives and seven hundred concubines. Among these it was not likely that he should find the fidelity which one true wife pays to one husband. Connected with Ecc 7:26, not an unqualified condemnation of the sex, as Pro 12:4; Pro 31:10, &c., prove.
John Gill on Ecclesiastes 7:28
Which yet my soul seeketh, but I find not,.... He was very earnest and diligent in his inquiry; he took a great deal of pains, and was exceedingly solicitous; he sought with great intenseness of mind, and with an eager desire, to find out a chaste and virtuous woman among them all, but could not;
one man among a thousand have I found; it is a great rarity to find a good man (n), truly wise and gracious; there are many that walk in the broad way, and but few that find the strait gate and narrow way, and are saved; they are but as one to a thousand; see Jeremiah 5:1. Or rather, by this one of a thousand, is meant the, Messiah, the Wisdom of God, he sought for, Ecclesiastes 7:25; and now says…
The Church Fathers
"Behold, I have found this, says the preacher, counting one by one, to find out the account. Which still my soul seeks, but I have not found it. I have found one man among a thousand, but one woman among all those I have not found. Only this have I found: that God has made man righteous, but he has sought out many inventions. "He says, "I found this", teaching all things diligently, that by sinning little by little, and adding one crime on top of another, we amass a great number of sins for ourselves. '"esebon"' even, which all translate as "logismon" in Greek, according to the ambiguity of the Hebrew language can be said by us to be 'number', 'sum', 'account', and 'consideration'. But, he says, my spirit sought even this question of whether woman is rightly found to be guilty. And although I found scarcely any men to be good, thus so that only one from a thousand can be found, I couldn't even find one woman to be completely good. For all of them have led me not to virtue but to self-indulgence. And because man's heart is predisposed towards wickedness from boyhood, and almost all of us offend God in some way, in this failing of mankind, women are more prone to this fate. The famous poet says about this: "inconstant and always changeable is woman" [Virg. Aen. 4. 569/70.]. And the apostle says, "always learning yet never arriving at the knowledge of the truth" [II Tim. 3.7.]. But he does not condemn this nature as being common to all mankind, or say that God the creator does evil things, because he is the creator of these things, but he warns subtly those who are not able to avoid evil, and says that we are created good by God; but he also says that because we are left with our own free-will to deteriorate into a worse and worse state through our own vices, while we seek greater things and contemplate many things beyond our strength. Differently: while I consider the reason behind each and every one of these verses, I have found no thought, which is not perturbed from outside by wicked thoughts. But in a thousand men I have found one man, who is made in the image of his creator; and not in a thousand of any kind, but of one thousand "men". There is not a like number of women corresponding to men. In the thousand, those who have not been close to a woman have therefore remained the most pure. But all this must be taken as a metaphor. In many though, who…
The Church Fathers: public-domain translations (Ante-Nicene and Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers), verse-indexed by SermonIndex (CC BY 4.0).
"Behold what I have found, saith Koheleth, adding one thing to another, to find out the account: What my soul hath still sought, and I have not found, (is this): one man among a thousand have I found; and a woman among all these have I not found." It is the ascertained result, "one man, etc.," which is solemnly introduced by the words preceding. Instead of אם קה, the words ראמר הקּה are to be read, after Ecc 12:8, as is now generally acknowledged; errors of transcription of a similar kind are found at Sa2 5:2; Job 38:12. Ginsburg in vain disputes this, maintaining that the name Koheleth, as denoting wisdom personified, may be regarded as fem. as well as mas.; here, where the female sex is so…
The NLT adds the phrase is virtuous (based on 7:29) to give the sense of the verse. Virtue is extremely rare: In his own experience, the Teacher found only a few men, and no women, with that quality.
Rashi on Ecclesiastes 7:28
For which yet my soul searches. In addition to those [quests] mentioned above, which I sought and did not find, my soul sought a proper one among women, but I did not find one, because they are all lightheaded.
One [worthy] man among a thousand I have found. It is customary in the world, [that out of] a thousand who enter [a school] to [learn] Scripture, emerge from them— successful and capable of [the study of] Mishnah— only one hundred. And of those hundred who enter [to study] Mishnah, only ten of them emerge for [the study of] Gemara, and of those ten who enter to [study] Gemara, only one emerges who is capable of rendering decisions [pertaining to religious matters], the result being o…