Psalm 88: Wonders For The Dead
Hell is the inability to share your sense of wonder with others
I think about wonderment a lot. I’m grateful that I still have a sense of wonder whenever I learn a new piece of knowledge or have a new realization about a text I’ve read a million times. I thrive on discovering a whole new discipline I never knew about, and being able to completely immerse myself in the deep sea of knowledge it contains. I excitedly call friends with the results of random rabbit holes I’ve recently traversed. I’m acutely aware that I’m an aberration in this sense.
As such, my eye was drawn to two phrases in Psalm 88. The first is where the depressed psalmist questions in 88:11 “Do you create wonders for the dead?” And the second is 88:13 “Are your wonders known in the darkness?” Many translators translate “darkness” as a metonym for the netherworld, in line with much of the other macabre imagery of the psalm.
The sense of wonder seems to be associated with the living. But more than only that, wonderment doesn’t happen in a vacuum. While alone in the deep, dark place (88:7), the psalmist feels distanced from his friends, an abomination to them.
Wonderment is social. In 88:12, the psalmist asks if the dead (“the grave”) recount God’s kindness. It returns us to 88:6, where the psalmist feels like he is surrounded by the forgotten dead. There is a sense of disconnect and isolation, surrounded by those who have no desire or ability to recount the wonders they’ve encountered.
The psalmist recounts the wonders daily in his prayers (88:14), but they seem to go unheard and unheeded (88:15). And in 88:19, he concludes the psalm with a reassertion of his isolation from the people he knows and loves.
Hell is the inability to share your sense of wonder with others. Being the only one fascinated by a subject, constantly surrounded by the apathetic, devoid of curiosity (an admittedly very metaphorical translation of 88:18), is psychologically distressing.
As I’ve completely parted with the literal translation of this psalm already steeped in metaphor, the reference to being surrounded by water in 88:18 and to being isolated in the depths of pit (let’s suppose) of water in 88:5-7, I can’t not be reminded of the connection of water and wisdom in Proverbs 18:4.
Imagine being surrounded by knowledge, and not being able to share it with anyone else. Our psalmist may consider that tantamount to being dead. Who am I to disagree with that?