Psalm 88 · Passage · Despair and Depression
The Darkest Psalm
Psalm 88, a maskil of Heman the Ezrahite, is a prayer from the edge of death.
The last Hebrew word of Psalm 88 is machshak, darkness, and A. F. Kirkpatrick called it “the saddest Psalm in the whole Psalter.”
You have removed my beloved and my friend; darkness is my closest companion.
- The passage
- Psalm 88:1 to 18
- Book
- Psalms
- Hold in memory
- Psalm 88:1
Summary
Psalm 88 is the prayer of a man who has suffered since his youth. His friends have turned from him, God's wrath rolls over him like waves, and he asks whether the dead can praise God. He keeps praying by day, by night and in the morning, and the psalm still ends with no answer and no word of praise.
- The psalm is built on three cries to God, at its first, ninth and thirteenth verses.
- In his first line the singer still names the LORD as the God who saves him.
- The title names Heman the Ezrahite, and Scripture knows a Heman whose wisdom Solomon surpassed and a Heman who led David's singers.
- Augustine heard the voice of Christ in the psalm, and it was appointed as a Proper Psalm for Good Friday.
Near to Sheol
The first cry asks to be heard and tells how close the singer stands to death.
The Darkest Psalm studies Psalm 88 under the trial of despair and depression. Its question is what a believer is to make of a prayer in Scripture that ends in darkness, and how such a prayer can still be faith.
It follows the psalm's three cries from the first verse to the last and reads its title and its singer, Heman. It gives what teachers from Augustine to Kirkpatrick have said a reader should do with the psalm. It also sets out three readings of who speaks in it and the case against each.
The first request is simple: “May my prayer come before You; incline Your ear to my cry” (Psalm 88:2).
For my soul is full of troubles, and my life draws near to Sheol.The verse stands here because it gives the reason for the cry, a soul full of trouble and a life at the edge of the grave.
He counts himself already among the dead: “I am forsaken among the dead, like the slain who lie in the grave” (Psalm 88:5). He says God has laid him “in the lowest Pit, in the darkest of the depths” (Psalm 88:6).
Your wrath weighs heavily upon me; all Your waves have submerged me. SelahThe verse stands here because the singer names God's own wrath as the weight that presses on him.
You have removed my friends from me; You have made me repulsive to them; I am confined and cannot escape.The verse stands here because the loss of his friends belongs to the same grief as his nearness to death, and he lays both at God's door.
Three Cries to God
The singer calls on the LORD by name at Psalm 88:1, Psalm 88:9 and Psalm 88:13.
The singer begins to pray again three times, and each prayer goes further into the dark.
An outline of three parts, each with the cry that opens it in the Berean words and what that part asks.
The division is Kirkpatrick's, in The Book of Psalms for the Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges (1906). Of the second part he wrote, “He has no hope in life. Yet he has continued instant in prayer.”
Do the Dead Praise You?
The second cry turns the singer's nearness to death into questions put to God.
Then come the questions of Psalm 88:10, “Do You work wonders for the dead? Do departed spirits rise up to praise You?” He asks whether God's loving devotion can be proclaimed in the grave and His faithfulness in Abaddon (Psalm 88:11).
Kirkpatrick explained the fear behind them. To the singer, “Sheol was the land of oblivion, where neither He remembered them, nor they remembered Him.”
Why Do You Reject Me?
The third cry turns from the grave to the LORD's rejection of the singer.
Why, O LORD, do You reject me? Why do You hide Your face from me?Its two questions carry the complaint that Psalm 88:15 to 18 goes on to describe.
He says that he has been afflicted and near death “from my youth” and that he has borne God's terrors (Psalm 88:15). The terrors engulf him “like water” all day long (Psalm 88:17).
Franz Delitzsch, in his Biblical Commentary on the Psalms (English edition 1871), heard in the psalm the language of Job and wrote that it “dies away in Job-like lamentation.”
Heman the Ezrahite
The title joins the sons of Korah to Heman, a name the histories give to more than one man.
Kirkpatrick prints the title as “A song, a Psalm of the sons of Korah” and “For the Chief Musician; set to Mahalath Leannoth. Maschil of Heman the Ezrahite”. He judged that Mahalath Leannoth was more probably the name of a tune, meaning “sickness to afflict”.
Solomon was “wiser than Heman, Calcol, and Darda, the sons of Mahol” (1 Kings 4:31), and the Chronicler lists Heman among the sons of Zerah (1 Chronicles 2:6). Another Heman, of the Kohathites, was “Heman the singer” (1 Chronicles 6:33 to 34), sounded the bronze cymbals (1 Chronicles 15:19), and is called “the king’s seer” (1 Chronicles 25:5).
One Heman or two2 paragraphs
Delitzsch called the title “a double inscription, the two halves of which are contradictory”, since the Ezrahite of 1 Kings 4:31 came from Judah and the singer from Levi. He suggested that Heman the Ezrahite, one of Solomon's sages, wrote the psalm from his own suffering and perhaps the Book of Job as well.
Kirkpatrick called that suggestion “Ingenious, but improbable” and judged that the musicians “have been wrongly identified with their namesakes the famous sages”. Among the other authors once proposed he listed “Jeremiah in his dungeon”, and he held that it is idle to speculate who the singer was.
A Prayer That Ends in the Dark
Two commentators found faith in the act of praying, even where the words find no light.
Delitzsch held that the name “God of my salvation” and the praying itself “show that the spark of faith within him is not utterly extinguished”. He called this fleeing to God in prayer through the dark “the fundamental characteristic of all true faith.”
Kirkpatrick saw in the psalm “a faith which trusts God utterly in spite of all discouragement, and cleaves to God most passionately when God seems to have withdrawn Himself most completely.”
A reader who prays this psalm in his own darkness should also seek a doctor's care beside his prayers. Anyone in danger of harming himself should call the local emergency number or a crisis line now and tell someone near him.
Who Speaks in Psalm 88
Three readings of the voice in the psalm, each with its holders and the objection to it.
The voice of the suffering ChristAugustine of Hippo
Augustine of Hippo, in his Exposition on Psalm 88, told his hearers, “Let us therefore now hear the voice of Christ singing before us in prophecy”. Kirkpatrick wrote that the psalm was appointed for Good Friday “doubtless because the Ancient Fathers interpreted it”, as they did Psalm 22, “as the utterance of the suffering Christ.”
Against it, Kirkpatrick held it best to read the psalm as springing from the personal experience of “some heavily afflicted saint”.
A sufferer's own prayerA. F. Kirkpatrick; Franz Delitzsch
Kirkpatrick thought the singer may have suffered from leprosy since childhood, so that “Life had been for him a living death”. Delitzsch also read the affliction as leprosy and the psalm as Heman's own experience.
Against it, Kirkpatrick himself granted in The Book of Psalms (1906) that “there is much to be said for the view that the speaker is Israel in exile”. He also allowed that the last line of Psalm 88:8 may be “metaphorical, describing the hopelessness of his condition as a prisoner who cannot escape.”
Israel in exileThe Targum; the Syriac Version
Kirkpatrick reports that the Targum paraphrases Psalm 88:6 as a placing “in exile which is like the nether pit”. He adds that the Syriac Version gives the title “Concerning the people which was in Babylon.”
Against it, Kirkpatrick answered that “there is nothing in it which demands the national interpretation, and much which it is most natural to regard as primarily personal”.
Still Praying in the Dark
Every line of the psalm, to its last, is spoken to God.
A believer who has no answer to bring may still bring the darkness itself to God, as the singer of Psalm 88 did.
Sources
Scripture is the Berean Standard Bible.
- STEP Bible, Translators Amalgamated Hebrew Old Testament (Tyndale House, Cambridge), CC BY 4.0.
- A. F. Kirkpatrick, The Book of Psalms, Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges (1906), introduction to Psalm 88.
- Franz Delitzsch, Biblical Commentary on the Psalms (Edinburgh, T. & T. Clark, 1871), on Psalm 88.
- Augustine of Hippo, Expositions on the Psalms, Psalm 88 (Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, first series, volume 8)
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