Ecclesiastes 11:7 - Dust and Spirit

Matthew Henry's Commentaries on Ecclesiastes 11:7:

Man is a strange sort of creature, a ray of heaven united to a clod of earth; at death these are separated, and each goes to the place whence it came. First, The body, that clod of clay, returns to its own earth. It is made of the earth; Adam�s body was so, and we are of the same mould; it is a house of clay. At death it is laid in the earth, and in a little time will be resolved into earth, not to be distinguished from common earth, according to the sentence (Gen. 3:19), Dust thou art and therefore to dust thou shalt return. Let us not therefore indulge the appetites of the body, nor pamper it (it will be worms' meat shortly), nor let sin reign in our mortal bodies, for they are mortal, Rom. 6:12. Secondly, The soul, that beam of light, returns to that God who, when he made man of the dust of the ground, breathed into him the breath of life, to make him a living soul (Gen. 2:7), and forms the spirit of every man within him. When the fire consumes the wood the flame ascends, and the ashes return to the earth out of which the wood grew. The soul does not die with the body; it is redeemed from the power of the grave (Ps. 49:15); it can subsist without it and will in a state of separation from it, as the candle burns, and burns brighter, when it is taken out of the dark lantern. It removes to the world of spirits, to which it is allied. It goes to God as a Judge, to give account of itself, and to be lodged either with the spirits in prison (1 Pt. 3:19) or with the spirits in paradise (Lu. 23:43), according to what was done in the body. This makes death terrible to the wicked, whose souls go to God as an avenger, and comfortable to the godly, whose souls go to God as a Father, into whose hands they cheerfully commit them, through a Mediator, out of whom sinners may justly dread to think of going to God.

Ecclesiastes 3:21

I have been thinking about the meanings of Ecclesiastes 3:21 for several days. To understand what the writer wanted to relay in the verse, I think I need to consider previous and following verses together.

Ecc 3:18 I said in mine heart concerning the estate of the sons of men, that God might manifest them, and that they might see that they themselves are beasts.

Ecc 3:19 For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them: as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath; so that a man hath no preeminence above a beast: for all [is] vanity.

Ecc 3:20 All go unto one place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again.

Ecc 3:21 Who knoweth the spirit of man that goeth upward, and the spirit of the beast that goeth downward to the earth?

Ecc 3:22 Wherefore I perceive that [there is] nothing better, than that a man should rejoice in his own works; for that [is] his portion: for who shall bring him to see what shall be after him?

Here the writer is saying that the sons of men and beasts are pretty much the same and their fates are not much different. So when the writer says "Who knoweth" in verse 21, I think the writer was questionining the common belief that the destinations of the spirit of man and the spirit of the beast are different as he said in verse 20 that the man and the beast are of the dust.

Another thing to ponder is whether the beast possesses the spirit as the man does. The same Hebrew word "ruwach" was translated as spirit for both the man and for the beast. The concordance on the word is found at the Blue Letter Bible web site.

What I cannot conclude at this time is whether the writer was saying that the animal possessed the same spirit as the man as the same word ruwach is used in many verses in the Bible to talk about the spirit of the man.