Ecclesiastes 6 · a question people ask
"I say that a stillborn child is better than he" (6:3). What is the Preacher saying?
He says it of one man, the man of the same verse, who "fathers a hundred children, and lives many years" (6:3), "but his soul is not filled with good, and moreover he has no burial" (6:3). He is that man. After 6:4-5, the Preacher comes back to him: "Yes, though he live a thousand years twice told, and yet fails to enjoy good, don’t all go to one place?" (6:6). So what he weighs is the man's many years without good. It is one of his sayings about what he has seen "under the sun" (6:1), and the introduction to Ecclesiastes sets it among the hard words the chapters quote as the text has them, without making any one of them the book's last word; the book's close is 12:13-14. These notes add no teaching of their own on what becomes of a child who dies.
The verses
“There is an evil which I have seen under the sun, and it is heavy on men:”
“If a man fathers a hundred children, and lives many years, so that the days of his years are many, but his soul is not filled with good, and moreover he has no burial, I say that a stillborn child is better than he; for it comes in vanity, and departs in darkness, and its name is covered with darkness. Moreover it has not seen the sun nor known it. This has rest rather than the other. Yes, though he live a thousand years twice told, and yet fails to enjoy good, don’t all go to one place?”
“This is the end of the matter. All has been heard. Fear God and keep his commandments; for this is the whole duty of man. For God will bring every work into judgment, with every hidden thing, whether it is good, or whether it is evil.”