Free among the dead, like the slain that lie in the grave, whom thou rememberest no more: and they are cut off from thy hand.
Free among the dead - i:e., severed from thy service. Compare as to the slave at death, Job 3:19, 'there the servant is free from his master.' As God's service is the highest happiness, so to be "free" from it is the worst of evils. A servant sometimes prefers to freedom the service of even an earthly master who is kind (Deuteronomy 15:16). Much more is liberty from God, our heavenly Master, to be deprecated (Psalms 86:16; Matthew 11:29-30; 1 John 5:3). When king Uzziah was stricken with leprosy for his presumption, he was by God, his Master, deprived of authority over his fellow-servants, and "was cut off from the house of the Lord," losing thereby his place in the house where all the servants of the Lord dwell. Thenceforth "he dwelt in a several house" as a leper (2 Chronicles 26:21), counted dead, and struck off from the number of God's servants. The Hebrew for "a several house" х chaapªshiy (H2670), a cognate form to the Hebrew, here for "free"] is literally 'a house of freedom.' Thus, too, the following clauses are strictly parallel: "Whom thou rememberest no more, and they are cut off from thy hand;" with which cf. 2 Chronicles 26:21,
Like the slain - the suppliant is threatened with a violent death, which accords with "cut off from thy hand" - from thy saving hand (Psalms 31:22). Death, in Old Testament times, was not as yet so entirely robbed of its terrors as it now is under the Gospel (2 Timothy 1:10). The severance of the soul from the body seemed a severance from the active service of God, and an exile to a "land of the shadow of death, without any order, and where the light is as darkness (Job 10:22). Hence, though often clear hopes are expressed (Psalms 16:9-11; Psalms 17:15; Psalms 73:24), at other times gloom prevails. Messiah especially, inasmuch as He bore to the uttermost the penalty for our sin, felt for the time, as man, death in its darkest aspect of seeming severance from Cod and from his sustaining hand.