Psalms 6:5 - Ellicott's Commentary On The Whole Bible

For in death. — As in Psalms 30:9, the sufferer urges as a further reason for Divine aid the loss Jehovah would suffer by the cessation of his praise. The Israelite’s natural dread of death was intensified by the thought that the grave separated him from all the privileges of the covenant with God. (Comp. Isaiah 38:18.) There can be neither remembrance of His past mercies there, nor confession of His greatness. The word translated grave, in exact parallelism with death, is sheôl, or underworld, in the early conception merely a vast sepulchral cave, closed as rock-tombs usually were by gates of stone or iron (Isaiah 38:10; Job 17:16). The derivation of the word is disputed, but the primary meaning appears to have been hollowness. It occurs sixty-five times in the Bible, and is rendered in the Authorised version three times “pit,” and then with curious impartiality thirty-one times “grave,” and as many “hell.” When it ceased to be merely a synonym for “grave,” and began to gather a new set of ideas we cannot ascertain. It was before the time of which we have any contemporary records. But it acquired these new ideas very slowly. Sheol was for a very long time only a magnified grave, into which all the dead, bad and good alike, prince and peasant, went; where they lay side by side in their niches, as the dead do in the loculi of eastern tombs now, without sense of light or sound, or any influence from the upper world (1 Kings 2:2; Job 30:23; Psalms 89:48). It is something more than death, put it is not life. The “sleep of death” expresses it. As in Homer’s Hades, the dead are men without the minds or energies of men — “soulless men; so the dead in the Hebrew conception are rephaim, that is, weak, shadowy existences. Indeed, the Biblical representation is even less tolerable than the Greek. Homer’s heroes retain many of their interests in the living world; they rejoice in the prosperity of their friends — their own approval or disapproval makes a difference to those still on earth — and, apart from this continued connection with the upper air, they had gone to a realm of their own, with its sovereign lord, its laws and customs, its sanctions, and penalties. Not so in the Jewish belief — “the dead know not anything”; “there is no wisdom in sheol.” It would be of no use for God to show any wonders among those incapable of perceiving them (Ecclesiastes 9:5-10; Psalms 88:10). They have passed altogether from all the interests and relations of life, even from the covenant relation with Jehovah. (Comp. Isaiah 38:18; Psalms 115:17.) How the Hebrew conscience, helped, possibly, by the influence of foreign ideas, gradually struggled into a higher light on these subjects, belongs to the history of eschatology. The fact that Psalms 6 reflects the earlier undeveloped doctrine, is an argument against any very late date for it.