1A song, a psalm for the Korahites, for the lead player, on the mahalath, to sing out, a maskil for Heman the Ezrahite.
2LORD, God of my rescue,
by night, in Your presence.
3May my prayer come before You.
Incline Your ear to my song.
4For I am sated with evils
and my life reached the brink of Sheol.
5I was counted among those who go down to the Pit.
I became like a man without strength,
6among the dead cast away,
like the slain, those who lie in the grave,
whom You no more recall,
and they are cut off by Your hand.
7You put me in the nethermost Pit,
in darkness, in the depths.
8Your wrath lay hard upon me,
and all Your breakers You inflicted.
selah
9You distanced my friends from me,
you made me disgusting to them;
imprisoned, I cannot get out.
10My eyes ache from affliction.
I called on You, LORD, every day.
I stretched out to You my palms.
11Will You do wonders for the dead?
Will the shades arise and acclaim you?
selah
12Will Your kindness be told in the grave,
Your faithfulness in perdition?
13Will Your wonder be known in the darkness,
Your bounty in the land of oblivion?
14As for me—to You, LORD, I shouted,
and in the morn my prayer would greet You.
15Why, LORD, do You abandon my life,
do You hide Your face from me?
16Lowly am I and near death from my youth
I have borne Your terrors, I am fearful.
17Over me Your rage has passed,
Your horrors destroy me.
18They surround me like water all day long,
they encircle me completely.
19You distanced lover and neighbor from me.
PSALM 88 NOTES
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1. Heman the Ezrahite. Scarcely anything is known about the identity of this figure—a choral leader? a psalmist?—or about Ethan the Ezrahite, who appears in the superscription of the next psalm. Both are mentioned in 1 Chronicles 2:6 as sons of Zerah from the tribe of Judah. “The Ezrahite” may be a familial designation derived from “Zerah.”
2. by day I cried out. The formulas of this verse and the next signal the genre of supplication. What distinguishes this particular supplication is its special concentration on the terrifying darkness of the realm of death that has almost engulfed the supplicant. In consonance with this focus, the psalm deploys an unusual abundance of synonyms for the underworld: Sheol, the Pit, the grave, the depths, perdition, the land of oblivion.
6. among the dead cast away. The predominant meaning of the adjective hofshi is “free,” but a negative sense is surely required here, and in 2 Kings 15:5, beyt haḥofshit means the place of quarantine in which those afflicted with the skin disease tsaraʿat are segregated. The Ugaritic cognate, moreover, appears to be a designation for the underworld; in fact, in verse 9 the speaker talks of imprisonment.
8. all Your breakers You inflicted. As in other psalms, the descent into the Pit of death is imagistically equated with drowning beneath the waves of the sea. Compare the apposition at the end of verse 7, “in darkness, in the depths.”
11. Will You do wonders for the dead? This is a recurrent idea in Psalms: the dead will not rise, will never again be able to fulfill the ultimate human vocation of praising the Creator.
12. perdition. The Hebrew noun ʾavadon, transparently derived from the verb that means to perish or to be lost, is probably a mythological proper name for the underworld, like Sheol.
14. in the morn. The Hebrew phrase is rendered literally, but its idiomatic sense is “every morning”; therefore, the verb “greet” is translated here as an iterative.
16. I am fearful. The Hebrew verb ʾafunah is anomalous and its meaning is uncertain. The translation follows a proposal by ibn Ezra.
18. They surround me like water. The water simile conveys the sense of total engulfment and carries forward the idea of death as drowning.
19. You distanced lover and neighbor from me. This clause picks up the idea of verse 9, using the same verb: the speaker, perhaps because he has been suffering from a repulsive illness or simply because his fortunes have met with disaster (like Job), has become an object of disgust to his friends.
My friends—utter darkness. “Utter” is added in the translation for the sake of intelligibility. This abrupt statement, just two words in the Hebrew, closes the poem on the theme of darkness that has dominated it throughout. The sense is either that the speaker’s friends, because they have rejected him and withdrawn their presence from him, are nothing but darkness to him, or that now the only “friend” he has left is darkness.