Psalm 88

Psalms 88:1-2

God of my salvation: The Hebrew title, which the reader floor does not show, reads A Song or Psalm for the sons of Korah, to the chief Musician upon Mahalath Leannoth, Maschil of Heman the Ezrahite; Heman is named beside Ethan in 1 Kings 4:31 as a wise man Solomon's own wisdom surpassed, and elsewhere as a Levitical singer of David's court. Even the opening line holds the word salvation while everything that follows contradicts it, O Lord God of my salvation, I have cried day and night before thee, faith and complaint stated in the same breath. Unlike every other lament in the Psalter this one never turns to praise before it ends, and the commentators name it the darkest psalm in the book for exactly that reason.

Psalms 88:3-7

full of troubles: My soul is full of troubles and my life draweth nigh unto the grave moves at once to the language of near death, counted with them that go down into the pit and free among the dead, a bitter phrase the older writers read as the one liberty death offers, cut off from the hand that had held him. Thou hast laid me in the lowest pit, in darkness, in the deeps piles up three places at once, and thy wrath lieth hard upon me, and thou hast afflicted me with all thy waves puts the affliction directly in God's own hand rather than an enemy's. The Selah at the end of verse 7 offers no relief, only a pause inside the same complaint.

Psalms 88:8-9

Thou hast put away mine acquaintance far from me, thou hast made me an abomination unto them names a social isolation as painful as the physical suffering, and I am shut up, and I cannot come forth uses language some commentators connect to the confinement laid on the leper in Leviticus 13, whether or not the sufferer's affliction was that disease. Mine eye mourneth by reason of affliction sets grief in the body itself, yet Lord, I have called daily upon thee, I have stretched out my hands unto thee shows the isolated man still praying, the one thing his circumstance has not taken from him.

Psalms 88:10-12

The four rhetorical questions of these verses argue from the Old Testament's own picture of Sheol: shall the dead arise and praise thee, shall thy lovingkindness be declared in the grave, shall thy wonders be known in the dark, each expecting the answer no, since the departed were held not to praise God from the place of the dead, a conviction the psalmist shares with Psalm 6:5 and Isaiah 38:18. The argument is not a claim about the dead's ultimate fate but a bargaining point in prayer, God's own praise put at stake in the sufferer's survival. The second Selah, at the end of verse 10, lets the questions stand unanswered exactly as the first one did.

Psalms 88:13-14

But unto thee have I cried, O Lord returns the psalm to address after the questions of the previous section, and in the morning shall my prayer prevent thee uses prevent in its older sense of coming before, the sufferer's prayer rising ahead of the day itself. Lord, why castest thou off my soul, why hidest thou thy face from me repeats the Psalter's own recurring complaint of divine hiddenness in its plainest words, asked and never answered within this psalm.

Psalms 88:15-18

I am afflicted and ready to die from my youth up marks the suffering as lifelong rather than a single crisis, and thy fierce wrath goeth over me, thy terrors have cut me off, they came round about me daily like water piles the imagery up to the very end of the poem. Lover and friend hast thou put far from me, and mine acquaintance into darkness closes the psalm on its last word, darkness, with no turn to trust, no vow of praise, no answered prayer. The commentators note the ending as deliberate rather than incomplete: Scripture gives the sufferer's own voice a place in the book with no resolution supplied, and licenses a reader to pray this psalm as it stands rather than rewriting its close.