Ecclesiastes3:16

Translation

Again I saw under the sun, that in the place

of judgment

there was wickedness, and in the place of righteousness there was wickedness.

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Paraphrase

I observed something else that happens here on earth—where we should see the proper execution of judgment, we see crimes against civil law carried out with impunity, and when we should see righteous acts we see only wicked acts.

Footnotes

1

Solomon uses two forms of the same word, and both mean “wickedness or wicked acts.” The first word seems to emphasize crimes against civil law, but it can mean other types of wickedness as well. The second time the word is used it is the root word itself which simply means “wicked acts.” This is Hebrew parallelism, saying the same thing twice in slightly different ways (or in some cases, parallelism is saying the same thing twice by stating two opposing sides, such as the statements in the Proverbs about the wise man and the fool).