"A Song. A Psalm of the Sons of Korah. To the choirmaster: according to Mahalath Leannoth. A Maskil of Heman the Ezrahite.
O Lord, God of my salvation;
I cry out day and night before you.
2 Let my prayer come before you;
incline your ear to my cry!
3 For my soul is full of troubles,
and my life draws near to Sheol.
4 I am counted among those who go down to the pit;
I am a man who has no strength,
5 like one set loose among the dead,
like the slain that lie in the grave,
like those whom you remember no more,
for they are cut off from your hand.
6 You have put me in the depths of the pit,
in the regions dark and deep.
7 Your wrath lies heavy upon me,
and you overwhelm me with all your waves. Selah
8 You have caused my companions to shun me;
you have made me a horror to them.
I am shut in so that I cannot escape;
9 my eye grows dim through sorrow.
Every day I call upon you, O Lord;
I spread out my hands to you.
10 Do you work wonders for the dead?
Do the departed rise up to praise you? Selah
11 Is your steadfast love declared in the grave,
or your faithfulness in Abaddon?
12 Are your wonders known in the darkness,
or your righteousness in the land of forgetfulness?
13 But I, O Lord, cry to you;
in the morning my prayer comes before you.
14 O Lord, why do you cast my soul away?
Why do you hide your face from me?
15 Afflicted and close to death from my youth up,
I suffer your terrors; I am helpless.
16 Your wrath has swept over me;
your dreadful assaults destroy me.
17 They surround me like a flood all day long;
they close in on me together.
18 You have caused my beloved and my friend to shun me;
my companions have become darkness."
Psalm 88
This is a very dark and sombre Psalm. Indeed, it stands alone in the Psalter as seemingly having no gleam of hope in it at all. The last verse is one which unfolds a terrible and desolating sense of loneliness and abandonment. One might be tempted to think that this must be the utterance of someone who has gone to pieces and is wallowing in his misery were it not for the fact that the title of the Psalm indicates the writer to have been Heman the Ezrahite, of whom we read in 1 Kings 4:31 that he was a man renowned for wisdom, excelled only by Solomon himself, and a man of stature and maturity. The dark experience recorded here therefore can hardly be regarded as the outburst of a fevered and emotional imagination, but a real dark night of the soul. As such, it has real affinities with the book of Job and the darkness recorded there. One commentator suggests that Job's words (Job 13:15), 'Though he slay me, yet will I trust him' indicate the very spirit of the Psalm. We should note that in spite of the gloom God is still the 'God of my salvation'. The message, then, is about trusting God in the darkness. In 1- 8 the Psalmist describes his hopeless condition. The prayer in 1, 2 is based on the catalogue of distress unfolded in 3ff. The desolating description in these verses has made scholars think that the Psalmist may have been suffering from leprosy; a characteristic feature in the treatment of this was that the victim was already accounted as dead (so 5). In 7 he thinks of himself as overwhelmed by the billows of God (cf Psalm 42:7). The fact that he attributes his woe to the wrath of God makes one wonder whether he was conscious of his own sin that has brought this predicament upon him. In 8 the picture of leprosy may again be in view, although the words may be simply metaphorical, describing the awful desolation of aloneness that comes in time of pressure. It is, indeed, a dark picture.