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Chapter 3. If someone entertains the doubts raised by these verses and thinks they prevent affirming that the resurrection of the dead is in this world,
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I have considered it appropriate to mention them and clarify the intended meaning in them.
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I say: they are three types of doubt, and each type has a corresponding mode of clarification.
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The first type is based on the servant Job's words: 'Remember that my life is a breath... the eye of him who sees me will behold me no more... For there is hope for a tree, if it be cut down, that it will sprout again... But a man dies and lies prostrate, he breathes his last — where is he? ...If a man dies, will he live again?' [Job 7:7–10; 14:7, 10, 14].
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The righteous ones who said these words did not intend by them that the Creator cannot revive the dead —
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for how could they face Him with such a claim when they knew He has power over all things?
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Rather, they intended by these words to describe the human being's helplessness once he enters the grave — his inability to raise himself, to wake from his sleep, or to return to his place of habitation.
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They are saying, as it were: O Lord, have mercy on a servant who is in this state of helplessness and destitution — to Your compassion alone he turns.
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The second type is based on the scriptural verse: 'He remembered that they were but flesh, a wind that passes and does not return. Man's days are like grass; he blooms like a flower of the field; for the wind passes over it and it is gone' [Ps. 78:39; 103:15–16].
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The purpose of these verses is to state that one of the reasons for God's mercy upon His servants is His knowledge of their weakness and mortality —
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and the inability of their souls to return to their bodies or to their places of abode on their own —
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they do not thereby imply that their Creator cannot return them — on the contrary, the more vividly this state is described from the human side as extreme, the greater God's power to restore them appears.
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This parallels how Scripture expresses wonder at the stand at Mount Sinai: 'Ask now of days long past... has there been such a great thing, or has any heard its like? Did any people hear the voice of God...?' [Deut. 4:32–33].
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God's power is best demonstrated precisely where created beings are most helpless.
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The third type is the scriptural passage: 'Whoever is chosen, among all the living, has hope; for a live dog is better than a dead lion' [Eccl. 9:4].
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'For the living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing, and they have no more recompense, for their memory is forgotten. Their love too, their hate too, and their envy too have already vanished, and they have no more share forever in all that is done' [Eccl. 9:5–6].
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Now these three verses, although they are the sage's words, are not his own position — they are his narration of what fools say.
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For he preceded them with a description of what churns in the hearts of fools regarding this condition, saying: 'The hearts of the sons of men are full of evil, and madness is in their hearts while they live, and after it — to the dead' [Eccl. 9:3].
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Once he established that in the hearts of people there is evil and madness owing to life's conditions and owing to death, he then described what is in their hearts —
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and stated the three verses — their message being that they say: a live dog is better than a dead lion,
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Since the sage did not speak these words until he had first identified them as the whispers and wickedness of fools, whoever clings to them is himself foolish — one who pays no heed and is unfit to draw upon them.