Translation Notes[1]
A song. A psalm of the Sons of Korah. For the director of music. According
to mahalath leannoth. A maskil of Heman the Ezrahite.
2 May my prayer come
before you; turn your ear to my cry.
3 For my soul is full
of trouble and my life draws near the grave.
4 I am counted among
those who go down to the pit; I am like a young man[3]
without strength.
5 I am forsaken among
the dead,[4]
like the slain who lie in the grave, whom you remember no more, who are cut off
from your care.
6 You have put me in
the lowest pit, in dark places, in the depths.[5]
7 Your wrath lies
upon me; you have overwhelmed me with all your waves. Selah
8 You have taken from
me my friends and have made me an object of loathing[6] to
them. I am confined and cannot escape; 9
my eye wastes away from affliction.[7]
I call to you, O LORD, every day; I spread out my hands to
you.
11 Is your love
declared in the grave, your faithfulness in Destruction?
12 Is your wonder made
known in darkness,[10]
or your righteousness in the land of oblivion?
13 But I cry to you
for help, O LORD, in the morning my
prayer comes before you.
14 Why, O LORD, do you reject me and hide your face
from me?
15 From my youth I
have been afflicted and close to death[11];
I have suffered your terrors and am in despair.
16 Your wrath has swept
over me; your terrors have destroyed me.
17 All day long they
surround me like a flood; they have completely engulfed me.
18 You have taken my
companions and loved ones from me; my friends are [in] a dark place.[12]
______________________________________________________________________________
Genre
Psalm 88 has the characteristics of
a lament psalm. The contents of lament
psalms typically convey confusion, anger, isolation, and apprehension, and Futato
notes they are designed to answer the three questions of who, what, and why:
“Who is there to hear the psalmist pray,” “Why [is the psalmist] experiencing
trouble,” and “What does the psalmist want God to do?”[13] Of particular note in this psalm is its
deeply personal nature–it never expands to the first person plural; it always
uses the first person singular. Also of
interest is the dearth of answers to the “what” question in this psalm.
Structure
-
Title–Much of the
significance of these titles are ambiguous.
The instruction “For the director” seems to indicate that this was performed
musically in a corporate setting at some point in Israel’s history. Heman was one of the three temple musicians
appointed by David in 1 Chron. 6:31-47, which would further support a musical performance
of this psalm. There also is a wise man
named Heman listed in 1 Kings 4:31 who some list as a candidate for this
designation.[14] Korah rebelled against Moses in Numbers 16, which
resulted in him and much of his family being destroyed by YHWH, though his “line
[…] did not die out” (Num. 26:11, NIV).
The despairing nature of this psalm seems consonant with the grief that
would be present in Korah’s descendants concerning the divine wrath that befell
the family, so one can see the logic behind what may have been an early Jewish
interpretation of the psalm. One can
speculate over the meaning of the titles, but their utility for interpretation
is not apparent.
-
Vv. 1-2–These opening
verses answer the “who” question in Futato’s scheme. This is a personal summons to God and
contains one of the few positive affirmations in this psalm–YHWH is the “God of
my salvation.” While the psalmist is in
dire straits, he still believes that voicing his lament to YHWH is of some
value, so there is an implicit trust in God’s goodness and availability. Verse 2 is the only explicit petition in the
psalm (13a may serve as an implicit one), a request that God would simply
listen.
-
Vv. 3-5–This section begins
the lament proper. The psalmist is
brimming with grief and existential angst; his very life seems to be sliding
away. He bewails death’s closeness, his
own weakness, and his forsakenness in relation to God and others. This psalm is referring to someone who is
afflicted with a severe malady. “The
individual statements let us recognize a very sick person who is near death.
[…] Very likely the petitioner is afflicted with a serious illness from his
youth. It is possible that he lives
outside the gate as an outcast.”[15] Many people in the writer’s context would have
seen “a direct connection between sin and sickness and [would have understood]
the sickness as the effect of God’s wrath.”[16] People external to the diseased lamenter
consider his fate sealed; he has been resigned to death in their minds and
abandoned.
-
Vv. 6-9a–The
lamenter starts directly attributing his sufferings to God’s action. YWHH has put him in the pit. YHWH has placed his overwhelming wrath on
him. YHWH has taken away friends and
made the afflicted one repulsive to them.
The writer has a pervasive sense of YHWH’s sovereign activity behind
these sufferings. With his own weakness,
his friends’ consigning him to death, and YHWH’s wrath, he feels trapped in
utter despair with no source of help.
There is some uncertainty over whether the reference to imprisonment is
metaphorical or literal; a literal use would fit well against an exilic
backdrop. Such direct implications of
YHWH with disaster and disease can be theologically problematic for NT
Christians unless the psalmist is being punished for sin. He makes no Job-like plea of innocence;
rather, he seems to focus on the magnitude of his suffering, perhaps to
elucidate pity from his listener, YHWH.
Jesus repudiates the notion of sickness always being caused by sin (John
9:1-3). God is not always the cause of affliction;
sometimes it results from people being rebellious (1 Cor. 11:27-32), sometimes
it comes from evil spiritual forces (Mark 9:17-27; Luke 13:10-13), and
sometimes we simply do not know why affliction comes (Job).
-
Vv. 9b-12–The
petitioning of verse 9b carries the assumption that God can make things
better. The lamenter is bargaining with
God for his life and well-being, and there seems to be an implicit vow of praise
at work here. With life and health he
can praise YHWH and declare his love and faithfulness, but as a dead man, no
such things will occur. The tacit idea
about Sheol is that it is “outside the world of the living where the LORD’s
works of salvation occur. The dead are
not remembered by the LORD; they are separated
from his power. The answer to the bitter
questions in verses 10-12 is no.”[17] The writer is unaware of God’s power over
Sheol, or at least chooses not to have it in mind (Psalm 139:8). Calvin notes how other OT authors have recognized
God’s mastery over death and yet defends the psalmist’s incomplete theology, writing
that when we are in severe sickness and sorrow, our minds do not always “pierce
to the consideration of the secret providence of God,” so we may allow
“unadvised words to escape from [our] lips.”[18]
-
Vv. 13-18–Verse
13 reveals why the psalmist cries out to YHWH–he is crying out for help. This is why he petitions YHWH to listen in v.
2 and is perplexed in verse 14; there is the expectation of God’s aid. Verse 15 reveals that the illness has been
chronic and severe since youth; this has been a protracted affair. The lamenter interprets his sickness as God’s
anger constantly engulfing him and stealing away his vibrancy. He leaves us in confusion, pain, and
isolation. The final colon is perplexing,
but the parallelism of Hebrew poetry and the prevalent use of a bicola format
in this psalm would suggest that the friends are “in a dark place,” which is a
rephrasing of God taking away his companions in the previous colon.
Religious
Affections and Theology
Several commentators have remarked
that this is the darkest psalm in the whole psalter. Though hard to detect upon first reading, the
writer has some positive views of God. God
is the “God of my salvation” (v. 1), a God with whom it is good to speak (vv.
2, 9b, 13). God is able to work wonders
in this life (v. 10); his love, faithfulness, and righteousness are things that
can be made known (vv. 11-12). The
perplexity at affliction (v. 14) betrays an anticipation of God’s goodness to be
manifested in the life of the psalmist.
Yet these beneficent affirmations and expectations never seem to come to
experiential fruition for the writer. In
spite of his hopes, he is constantly haunted by pain, exclusion, and death’s
slow crawl toward him. There is no happy
ending or optimistic recalling of YHWH’s faithfulness, no skipping off to hope. This psalm compels us to deal with the ugly
reality of undesired suffering and isolation, of being abandoned by others and
feeling abandoned by God. We are forced
to come face to face with our mortality and weakness, realizing that we have
nothing apart from the sheer grace of God.
The profound loneliness and misery here reminds us that it is fitting to
express our grief and our frustrations with God; we do not have to run from these
or pretend that everything is okay. In
fact, we are given a model of how to proceed in grieving as we enter into very
dark times.
The
psalmist displays a dogged persistence. Regardless of years of affliction and his
prayers not being answered the way he would like, he still comes to God in
prayer day and night, morning by morning, the pathos of his bruised faith cutting
straight to the heart. He is a strange coalescence,
in a “state in which Hope despairs, and yet Despair hopes at the same time.”[19] The Holy Spirit has placed this psalm on our
lips for times when we are in the midst of terrible affliction ourselves, that “our distresses, however grievous, may not
overwhelm us with despair; or if we should at times be ready to faint through
weariness, care, grief, sorrow, or fear, that we may not on that account
despond.”[20] We, too, can persevere in prayer and not lose
hope when we are hard pressed (Luke 18:1).
Christians
have an advantage over the psalm-writer: we know that God has dominion even
over the realm of the dead. “There is
suffering and death in the Old Testament, but it is only in the New that we see
what suffering and death really means, as it becomes the work of God Himself,
as God gives himself to this most dreadful of all foreign spheres.”[21] Through Christ’s death and resurrection, God
has indeed “worked wonders for the dead” and “declared his love from the grave”
(vv. 10-12). We do not have to fear
death. In fact, we can anticipate it,
for then we get to be with our Lord Jesus (Phil. 1:23a). The Christ who took our sins and afflictions
upon himself even to death (Isa. 53:4-12) shows that suffering is not
pointless, that it can be redemptive. Indeed,
those who seek to follow Christ will go through suffering and “fill up in [our]
flesh what is still lacking in regard to Christ’s afflictions,” but it is for
the positive purpose of building the church (Col. 1:24, NIV). Actually, Christ so closely identifies with
his people that our present afflictions become his own (Mat. 25:31-46; Acts 9:5). In the darkness of our own distress and unanswered
prayers, we can know that we are held by this Christ who suffers with us, the
Christ who himself bore our afflictions, the Christ who has gone before us into
death, showing us that God’s love can be declared even beyond the grave through
his triumphant resurrection.
Bibliography
Calvin, John. Commentary on the Book of Psalms, Volume III.
Translated by James Anderson.
Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1949.
Futato, Mark. Interpreting the Psalms: An Exegetical
Handbook. Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel
Publications,
2007.
__________. The
Book of Psalms. Cornerstone Biblical Commentary, Volume 7. Carol Stream,
IL:
Tyndale House Publishers, 2009.
Kraus, Hans-Joachim.
Psalms 60-150: A Commentary. Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress,
1989.
Mays, James L. Psalms.
Interpretation. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1994.
[1]
I use the NIV here, making footnoted adjustments where I think the text could
be rendered better.
[2]
I choose to see verb gapping at work here rather than a null copula withיוֹם־צָעַ֖קְתִּי בַלַּ֣יְלָה נֶגְדֶּֽךָ , since the focus of the text appears
to be on the cry.
[4] בַּמֵּתִ֗ים חָ֫פְשִׁ֥י is vexing; I follow closest with the NASB
and NRSV. Calvin goes with the literal “I
am free among the dead.”
[5]
Following the New American Standard version.
[8]
Following NRSV, ESV, and the sense of the NASB.
[11]
The Hebrew is mystifying here, so I follow with many of the English
translations.
[12]
The Hebrew is problematic; with מְֽיֻדָּעַ֥י מַחְשָֽׁךְ , there are no
prepositions, but the principle of parallelism in Hebrew poetry would suggest the
NRSV’s translation so that both cola refer to friends being taken away and
distant.
[13]
Mark Futato, Interpreting the Psalms: An
Exegetical Handbook (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Publications, 2007), 150-155.
[14]
Calvin argues for this in John Calvin, Commentary on the Book of Psalms
Volume III (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1949), 406.
[15]
Hans-Joachim Kraus, Psalms 60-150: A Commentary (Minneapolis, MN:
Augsburg Fortress, 1989), 192.
[16]
James L. Mays, Psalms, Interpretation (Louisville, KY: Westminster John
Knox Press, 1994), 163.
[17]
Ibid., 283.
[18]
John Calvin, Commentary Upon the Book of Psalms, Volume III, 410-411.
[19]
The author is quoting Martin Luther.
Mark Futato, The Book of Psalms, Cornerstone Biblical Commentary, Volume 7 (Carol Stream, IL:
Tyndale House Publishers, 2009), 286.
[20]
Calvin, Commentary Upon the Psalms,
Volume III, 407.
[21]
Kraus citing Karl Barth, Psalms 60-150, 195.
