Ecclesiastes 12:2,3 - Coke's Commentary on the Holy Bible

While the sun, or the light.— Before the sun, and the light, and the moon, and the stars be darkened, and the clouds return after the rain. Ecclesiastes 12:3. In the day when the keepers of the house shall tremble, &c. Desvoeux; who renders the grinders, the grinding-maids, and observes, that whoever reads this description of old age with a tolerable degree of attention must observe, that the beginning of it consists of a double figure; namely, an allegory and a prosopopoeia;—whereby the most visible infirmities attending the last stage of life are very elegantly set forth. The whole outward frame of the human body is allegorically represented as a house; and without departing from the allegory, the most remarkably active parts of the body are personified, and appear in the description as so many men or women, to whom the several employments belonging to the house are devised: The keepers of the house, &c. to the voice of the grinding-maid, is lowered. But all on a sudden Solomon leaves off that lofty figurative style; not to explain it by saying in plain literal terms what he had already expressed in those daring figures; but to go on with his description, in quite a different strain. There is no more mention of the house; the subject understood by the house comes in without any disguise, and is plainly called He:—He shall rise up, &c. The infirmities of old age, or rather the alterations produced in our habits and inclinations through the bodily infirmities which generally attend that period of life, are recited in plain literal words, rather than described. If we find two figurative expressions in that part of the account, viz. the daughters of the song, and the grasshopper, the first was, either by use and custom, or at least by its analogy with other expressions of the same kind, equivalent to a proper one; and the second, which, for aught we know, may also have been in the same case, was chosen for decency's sake, to avoid an obscure word. But it is very remarkable, that, figurative as that expression is, the figure is confined within the word, and does not extend to the sentence; for what is said of the grasshopper, that it shall become a burden, nec quicquam nisi pondus iners, is an accident belonging to that which is meant by the grasshopper, but in no way to that insect itself; whereas it should belong to both, if the sentence was allegorical. This part of the description, therefore, may be truly called literal; And he shall rise at the crowing of the cock, and all the singing-women shall be dismissed, &c. Ecclesiastes 5:4-5. One would imagine that the description, if it be not complete, must proceed in the same way; but the author changes his style again, and abruptly resumes the allegory; yet not the same that he had already employed, but a new one, in order to describe the inward disorders under the weight of which an old man must sink at last, and be brought to his grave. Here there is no more mention of a man; nothing offers itself to a reader who looks no farther than the literal sense, except a well, once richly furnished with whatever was necessary for drawing water out of it, but now becoming useless through the decay of the several parts of the engine.