27 Behold, this have I │ _Observe_, this have I found, saith the Preacher, │ discovered, and this is ¹_counting_ one by one, to │ what the Preacher announces, find out the account: │ one after another, so as to │ find out a wise experiment; 28 Which yet my soul │ but which I have longed for seeketh, but I find not: one │ without discovering: one man among a thousand have I │ single specimen of Humanity in found; but a woman among all │ a thousand I discovered; but those have I not found. │ a woman in all these I did not │ discover. ¹ _Or_, _weighing_ one thing │ after another to find out │ the reason. │ (27, 28.) =Observe this, have I found the speech of Koheleth= (it is usually said that אמרה is a feminine agreeing with קהלת, but קהלת was a king, and so certainly masculine. It has been proposed to write אמר ‎‏הקהלת, but this is another instance of the attempt to cut the knot by altering the text, besides in that case Koheleth would be generic. We must therefore fall back upon the usual meaning of feminines as the abstract of the masculines. Now, אמר is ‘to say,’ to ‘announce,’ and therefore the abstract will be ‘the announcement;’ this abstract, however, stands by itself, and is not joined closely to קהלת, as in that case it would have been אמרת. Attending then to these principles of grammar, the meaning will be, ‘observe this, I have found it, and announce it as Koheleth,’ an additional proof that here we have a personal experience of Koheleth’s) =one to one to find a wise result=, (that is collecting instance after instance, or trying one method after another so as to find the wise result, in contrast to the disappointing folly mentioned above) =which yet seeks my soul=, and =has not found= (the ‘not’ is emphatic, and denies that he has discovered it: experimental science did no more for him than moral); =a man= (אדם; we should have anticipated איש from the context, but אדם includes both sexes, so that we have a sarcastic equivoke) =a single one from a thousand have I found, but a woman in all these have I not found= (that is, that he could come to no general conclusion; only in his experience he had met with one man but not with one woman, the allusion being evidently to his thousand wives and concubines. From this individual history we are allowed to make our own conclusions. In the case of Solomon, it was his numerous wives which turned away his heart. He had apparently one or two male friends, such as Zadoc and Nathan, that he could trust. The word ‘found’ occurs seven times in its different forms――it is _all_ he could discover).