Bible Strands
Ecclesiastes 2:5
I made gardens and parks for myself, where I planted all kinds of fruit trees.
Berean Standard Bible
Follow its threads on the canvas →
Study note
Setting — The Preacher recounts his personal expansion of royal resources during his reign, addressing a general audience in a retrospective memoir.
The words — The Hebrew verbs עָשִׂיתִי (‘āśîṯî) and נָטַעְתִּי (nāṭa‘tî) literally mean “I made” and “I planted,” highlighting the speaker’s direct, hands-on agency in constructing these spaces.
The thread — This deliberate planting echoes God’s initial work in Genesis 2:8, while the garden motif reappears in Song of Solomon 4:12 and 6:2 as a marker of cultivated intimacy.
Why it lands — The text explicitly records the speaker’s investment of labor and resources into fruit-bearing cultivation before evaluating their ultimate worth, requiring the reader to weigh human effort against lasting significance.
Drafted by a language model from the text, its original words and its cross-references, then checked against them. It can still be wrong: open the verse in the app to report it.
The Hebrew words
King James Version
I made me gardens and orchards, and I planted trees in them of all kind of fruits:
Cross-references
- Genesis 2:8 And the LORD God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, where He placed the man He had formed.
- Song of Solomon 4:12 My sister, my bride, you are a garden locked up, a spring enclosed, a fountain sealed.
- Song of Solomon 6:2 My beloved has gone down to his garden, to the beds of spices, to pasture his flock in the gardens and to gather lilies.
- Jeremiah 39:4 When Zedekiah king of Judah and all the soldiers saw them, they fled. They left the city at night by way of the king’s garden, through the gate between the two walls, and they went out along the route to the Arabah.
- Luke 17:27 People were eating and drinking, marrying and being given in marriage, up to the day Noah entered the ark. Then the flood came and destroyed them all.