Ecclesiastes 4:9–12

Public domain, so these words can be printed in a ceremony script or an order of service.

Ecclesiastes opens by naming its voice as “the Preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem”, a speaker who spends most of the book doubting that anything lasts.

The argument is practical. Two people working together get a better return than one. If one falls, the other picks them up, and pity the person who falls with nobody there. Two lying together keep warm. One person can be overpowered where two can hold their ground. Then the closing image: a cord of three strands is not quickly broken. It is advice about partnership from a book that is otherwise skeptical of almost everything, which gives it weight.

Plain and practical. Works at a service with almost no religious framing. Read at a wedding ceremony. Themes: partnership · practical love · holding each other up · a threefold cord · short reading.

Couples who think of marriage as a team, and ceremonies that include a cord-tying or handfasting, where the three-strand line becomes the ritual’s explanation. Christian couples often read the third strand as God; secular couples read it as the community or the marriage itself. It is short, plain and hard to get wrong.

Directly before a cord-of-three-strands or handfasting ritual, so the officiant can move from the last line into the tying. Without a ritual, it sits well as a first reading. Often read by a friend who knows the couple as a team.

The text on this page is 78 words. At a ceremony pace of about 130 words a minute, which is slower than conversation, that comes to about 35 seconds of reading.

• The passage is a set of short practical examples. Read it in a plain, almost conversational voice; it is advice, not poetry.
• “Woe to him that is alone when he falleth” is the only dark line. Do not rush past it; it is what gives the closing image its strength.
• End on the threefold cord and stop. Do not add a comment of your own before the officiant takes over.

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