The pursuit of pleasure having led only to a dead end, Koheleth warns that if he, with all the resources at his disposal, found it to be like that, it is hardly likely to turn out any differently for anyone else—this seems to be the meaning of the difficult second half of verse 12 for which our English Bibles offer a wide variety of interpretations. He turns, therefore, to look at human experience in all its rich variety, from ‘wisdom’ at one end of the spectrum to ‘folly’ at the other. We have