Psalms 6:4,5 - Joseph Benson’s Commentary on the Old and New Testaments

Return Unto me, from whom thou hast withdrawn thy smiling countenance and helping hand. Deliver my soul From guilt and fear; or preserve my life, for the word soul often signifies life. David, and other pious men in those times, were much averse to, and afraid of death, partly because the manifestations of God's love to his people, and the discoveries of an immortal state of glory awaiting them after death, were then more dark and doubtful; and partly because thereby they were deprived of all opportunities of advancing God's glory and kingdom in the world. For in death Or among the dead, or in the grave, as it follows; there is no remembrance of thee This is meant only of the bodies of persons deceased; not of their souls, which still survive, and do not sleep till the resurrection, as some have vainly imagined: and yet even their souls are incapable, when departed from the body, of remembering, praising, and glorifying God, in his church on earth; of celebrating his mercy and grace in the land of the living; of propagating his worship, or of exciting others to piety by their example: which is the remembrance of God of which he speaks. Hence, also, good men have often desired to have their lives prolonged, even under the Christian, as well as under the Patriarchal and Jewish dispensation, that they might be capable of glorifying God, and of fully executing his will in this world, in order, as the Hebrews speak, to increase the reward of their souls in the world to come.