Bible Commentaries

1. O Lord God of my salvation—A genuine outburst of holy trust in the faithfulness of God; but the sunshine is soon lost amid the blackest clouds.

Day and night—Unceasingly and for a long time. So David, Psalms 22:2

2. Let my prayer come before thee—My prayer shall come before thee. The future tense and declarative form of the verb indicate faith and purpose in the suppliant to seek help only and continually in God.

3. For my soul is full of troubles—Life can endure no more. From this to Psalms 88:9, the author urges his great distress as an argument for the divine interposition.

My life draweth nigh unto the grave—My life reacheth to, or toucheth, sheol. This proximity to death is called “gates of death,” Psalms 9:13; Psalms 107:18

4. I am counted—I am already reckoned among the dead. The pit— Another word for grave, and equal to sheol, Psalms 88:3. See Psalms 88:6.

As a man that hath no strength—Literally, As a strong man, or warrior, without strength.

5. Free among the dead—If הפשׁי, (haphshee,) is to be translated free, as in the common version, which is its prevailing sense; it must here denote freedom “from the cares and oppression of life,” and so Dr. Robinson.

Thus it is used, Job 3:19, “There [in death] the servant is free from the master.” This sense also would suit to the political condition of the author. Death would free him from the Chaldean yoke. But this is not in harmony with the connexion or scope. Better to translate prostrate among the dead. Furst: “My couch is among the dead.” Gesenius: “Among the dead I am laid prostrate.” The next clause explains it.

Like the slain that lie in the grave—Like those killed in battle who lie down in the grave. The expression is very strong. It is not merely to die, nor to be buried, but to be in sheol among the spirits of the departed. So the same verb, to lie, signifies, (Genesis 47:30,) “I will lie with my fathers.”

Whom thou rememberest no more—That is, with a view to treat them as living men upon the earth. The word remember is never used in the metaphysical sense of simply recalling past impressions or ideas, but always in the ethical sense—that is, with the adsignification of the object or purpose of remembering.

From thy hand—By thy hand. So Exodus 2:23 :

“Sighed by reason of the bondage.” Hebrew, Sighed from, that is, from the effects of, their bondage. In the text the reference is to those who are dead from—from the effects of—God’s hand by reason of his judgments.

6. Thou hast laid me in the lowest pit—In Psalms 88:4-5, he was already in the pit and in sheol. Here, in the “lowest” or deepest pit.

In darkness— The pit is so deep that the daylight is shut out.

In the deeps—The depths of the ocean are intended, (as in Nehemiah 9:11; Job 41:31; Psalms 107:24,) to the Hebrew always a mystery and a terror. But the psalmist might have comforted himself by the promise of Psalms 68:22. Compare “lowest sheol” and “lower parts of the earth.” Psalm 67:9; Psalms 86:13

7. Thou hast afflicted me with all thy waves—The figure of the deeps, Psalms 88:6, is brought forward. He is in the boiling depths of the ocean, and a heavy tempest is raging over him. See Jonah 2:3; Psalms 42:7

8. Mine acquaintance—The neighbouring nations. The psalmist is speaking from the soul of his people. The social aspect of his sufferings now appears.

An abomination unto them—Abominations, the plural form, is intensive—an assemblage of abominations. The hatred and loathing contempt of the neighbouring nations developed fearfully against the Hebrews at the time of their fall by the Chaldeans. See Psalms 137:7; Ezekiel 26:2; Zephaniah 2:8-9; Lamentations 3:14.

I am shut up, and I cannot come forth—An unquestionable description of prison life, fitly applying to King Jehoiachin, who passed thirty-six years of the captivity in a Babylonian prison. 2 Kings 24:12; 2 Kings 24:15; 2 Kings 25:27-30; Jeremiah 52:31-34. See Lamentations 3:6-9

9. Mine eye mourneth… I have called daily… I have stretched out my hands—My eye, voice, and hands give expression daily of my suffering and peril, and plead for me. Thus far the psalmist’s prayer is grounded on his miserable state, but now he introduces another argument, and pleads that God will be glorified more in his salvation than in his death.

10. Wilt thou show wonders to the dead—A wonder, singular, a token, a proof of saving power and favour. God’s “wonders,” for the edification of living men, are shown to the living, not to the dead. Why, then, should he be left to die?

Shall the dead arise and praise thee—The “dead,” here, does not refer to dead bodies, but to disembodied spirits, or, as the ancient idea was, the shades or manes of the dead; and the rising must not be understood of a resurrection of the body, but of the rising up, as from a recumbent posture, of the shades or spirits of the departed in their abode in sheol. רפאים, (rephaim,) here translated dead, is a different word from “dead” in the previous clause, and is the term for giants, (as Genesis 14:5; Deuteronomy 2:11; Deuteronomy 2:20,) and the climax seems to require the sense of mighty dead, or shades of the mighty, as in Isaiah 14:9 : “Sheol… raiseth for thee the mighty dead, all the great chiefs of the earth.”—Lowth. These spirits were living, but had no sensible connexion with this world. The sense, therefore, is this: “Wilt thou produce a wonder to the dead? Shall the [spirits of the] mighty dead rise up [in their abode in sheol] and praise thee?” Nothing could make it more clear that the Hebrews considered living men to be debarred all direct intercommunion with the dead, so that the latter could not rise up and declare to the living what are the divine dispensations to them, and thus cause their experiences to become salutary to the living. And hence the argument all along implies, that if help were not quickly shown to the suppliant psalmist, while yet numbered with the living, the moral effect of his deliverance would be lost, and God would not be glorified by it. As to the supposed adverse bearing of this and other texts on the belief of man’s immortality, see on Psalms 115:17, and the references there made. We say with Bishop Alexander: “How could Christianity, all quivering with the hopes and fears of another life, have issued from Judaism, if Judaism had possessed nothing of the kind?”

11. Destruction—The Hebrew word is simply parallel to grave in the previous line; equal to sheol, place of the dead. There is no allusion whatever to annihilation. These poetical descriptions must always be construed phenomenally, as they appear to the eye with reference to living men, never in the abstract or metaphysical sense.

12. The dark—Same as “grave.” So αδης, hades, (answering everywhere to שׁאול, sheol,) is compounded of α, privative, (not,) and ειδω, (to see,) not to see, unseen, and means the world I do not see, the unseen world. The same is called darkness in the text.

Land of forgetfulness—So called because the dead, after a few generations, are generally forgotten from the records of the living. This is true to fact in all ages with the masses of mankind. And is not death, in its physical aspect, still viewed, under the Christian religion, in the same chilling and gloomy light? Even the Saviour said: “The night cometh, when no man can work.” John 9:4. To the instincts of our nature death must ever be saddening and abhorrent. Its terrors are swallowed up only through faith and hope in the infinite “beyond”—a moral victory over what is still, per se, an unchanged natural evil. “The psalter would be incomplete without expressions of the sadness which comes with the prospect of death.”—Bishop Alexander. Without this a great moral lesson would be lost, and the Bible would be untrue to itself and to nature.

13. Unto thee have I cried—Here faith rallies and reasserts herself, as in Psalms 88:1. No relief has yet come, but the psalmist gives himself to prayer, which itself implies hope.

14. Lord, why—Still the mystery returns to perplex. Why should God thus, by delay, seem to choose his destruction rather than his salvation?

15. Ready to die from my youth up—Literally, Dying from my youth. So repeated and terrible were the chastisements of God for disobedience, from the days of Moses till now, that, comparatively, the nation had lived a dying life. What an experience for a professed worshipper of God, whether Jew or Christian!

16. Cut me off—Thy terrible judgments have severed me from the living.

17. They came round… like water—The figure again changes. The psalmist is enclosed in a flood, and whelmed, as in Psalms 88:6-7

18. Lover and friend—The removal of these may well form the climax of his misery. All lost; not even the sympathy of friendship left to alleviate the horror of his despair.

Mine acquaintance into darkness—Hebrew, My acquaintances… darkness. “Into,” is not in the text. The idea is, not that God had put his acquaintances (plural) “into” darkness, but that with darkness, henceforth, should be his intimate and only companionship. The complaint has now reached its climax, as in Job 17:14 : “I called to corruption, Thou art my father; to the worm, Thou art my mother and my sister.” Such complaints, like Ecclesiastes, seem designed to suggest what human sorrow is, and must be, apart from the hope of divine favour and eternal life. See Psalms 143:3; Lamentations 3:6.