The Preacher employs twin rhetorical questions to drive home humanity’s double ignorance: we cannot discern what is truly good during our brief earthly existence, nor can we know what legacy or consequences will follow our death. By framing these as unanswerable questions rather than declarative statements, he engages the reader’s own uncertainty and forces personal acknowledgment of our epistemic limitations apart from divine revelation.

The Preacher provides no direct answer within this verse; the rhetorical questions stand unanswered to emphasize humanity’s ignorance. The surrounding verses (Ecclesiastes 6:10-11 and 7:1-14) continue the meditation on human limitations and the inscrutability of God’s timing, implying that fear of God is the only wise response to our ignorance.

The Preacher asks who knows what is good for man and who can tell what follows after death, not to solicit answers but to confront the reader with the stark limits of human wisdom. The Hebrew word for good, tov (טוֹב), carries moral, aesthetic, and practical dimensions, what is beneficial, right, and ultimately satisfying. By coupling it with vain life (literally “the number of the days of the life of his hebel”), he stresses the incongruity: how can creatures as transient as shadows discern lasting good? The form of rhetorical questioning rather than direct assertion invites the reader into the Preacher’s frustration, making it personal and inescapable. This double ignorance, what is good now and what comes later, forms the epistemological crisis at Ecclesiastes’ heart. Only the fear of God and obedience to His commandments (Ecclesiastes 12:13) can resolve what unaided human reason cannot penetrate.