Ps. 6: (Sheol and memory)

Ps. 6.5

For in Death  /  there is  /  no memory  /  of you

In Sheol  /  who can  /  praise you?

There are several lines of thought that we have been pursuing that are here gathered together: death as a form of dissolution and sickness as Yhwh’s anger expressed in distance. We do not need to rehash these insights, except to make the conclusion that has so far been absent: death is final destination of this man’s sickness and death, therefore, has been the underlying and driving concern throughout the psalm. We noted this in a previous reflection: as one meditates more and more on the name of Yhwh, one begins to see how fundamentally it utterly reorients one’s vision of the source of life and likewise what death actually is. In other religious conceptions (that I’m aware of) death was the entering into the divine sphere of the dead. There were “gods of the underworld”. In this way, death was still sacred because, however oddly, it basked in the (dark) glow of a divine god. To look upon a dead person was, in some manner, to look at the face of a god (whether Hades or whomever). In Israel, Yhwh is not the god of the dead, but of the living. There can be no heroic journeys to the underworld in the OT. It is not a divine realm. The point to make is this: life and death were, in cultures other than that embodied in the OT, conceived as different, divine realms (regardless of the fact that the realm of the dead was not ‘equal’ in goodness to the realm of the living (although, perhaps, more powerful…)). In the OT there is only one realm, the realm of Yhwh, and his realm is one of life. Death and sickness, then, were understood as distance from this one realm (either in active expulsion or in Yhwh’s ‘turning his back’). Life was, and this is the crucial point, conceived along the lines of a spectrum (nearness: life; distance: death) and not along the lines of different, divine spheres. For this reason death is not conceived as some absolute break; it stood on the far side of the spectrum as its ‘conclusion’. Sickness is therefore a type of participation in death. It begins the “robbery” of our faculties. It begins the turning of us into the “shadows” that dwell in Sheol (likewise, to be ‘exiled’ is to be thrown along the spectrum toward death; hence, when Lazarus is ‘raised from the dead’ of his corruption we are to see in this a ‘restoration’ from exile). Understood rightly, what we see is an absolute and definitive valuation of the goodness of life. There is, however, a “price to pay”. Death has no value and is the realm of Yhwh’s abandonment. Sheol holds absolutely no appeal; it has no glory and, although it is never stated thus, would be the realm of absolute boredom. It is along these lines that we must understand, in this Psalm, Yhwh’s “anger” and “wrath”. Any movement along the spectrum, either toward Yhwh or away from him, is one either towards his lovingkindness or towards his abandonment.

With this in mind we now move into this idea of Sheol, or Death, as “lacking praise” and “memory of Yhwh”. Some initial (and tentative) observations about memory: memory is often conceived as the sign of absence, meaning, it is the recalling of something that is no longer there. In this way, memory is a re-calling of the past, but it is not a re-living of the past. There is also a hidden presupposition that the thing remembered is/would be “better” than its memory; the memory is but a shadow of the real thing, an ‘echo’ of the original. A favorite poet of mine, Wallace Stevens, called much of this into question and asked whether memory was not itself an aspect of the thing remembered. What I mean is that, for him, reality was meant to be ‘born’, at least in part, in the memory. The moment vanishes and cannot be contained. It is often only in the memory that the full import of those moments can be revealed. And, not just that, but the memory actually provides something new. It has its own ‘fruit’. It, and it alone, is able to overcome the momentary and, with its own power, give birth to hidden insights. Reality has, incorporated into it, this sense of being born in memory. In this regard, memory is presence, not absence.

These previous observations are similar, in some regard, to what we find in the OT, specifically in the book of Deuteronomy and particularly in chapter 8. Throughout the book Moses is doing something profound, and dizzying, with time and memory. He keeps referring to the “previous generation” and their hearing the “words of Yhwh” at Mount Sinai, but then says those who are listening to him “heard those words”. Likewise, he speaks as if Israel’s memory of that event was, literally, a making present of that event. This leads to the profound claim that the recitation of the Decalogue was the ‘recitation’ of Yhwh’s manifestation—they are absolutely wed. To speak the Torah was to make Yhwh’s glory present.

And, Yhwh’s presence always engenders praise. Throughout the Psalms we will see this continual refrain to “remember the works of the Lord”. And they are largely set within the context of Psalms of praise; when one recovers from sickness or is delivered, on immediately “recounts the works of the Lord”.

So what do we see? Memory is not simply absence but that, on a purely natural level, reality is ‘geared’ towards memory; it yearns forward to it, bride-like. Biblically, memory of Yhwh’s works (particularly his torah) is a making present of Him. Likewise, this ‘making present’ engenders praise.

In the context of our psalm, this now makes a great deal of sense: the dead do not “remember the Lord”, not because they are mindless shadow’s who have been robbed of all memory. They do not “remember the Lord” because Sheol is the place of Yhwh’s abandonment. If “memory of the Lord” is intimately tied to His presence, then one cannot “remember him” in the land of the dead. Likewise, one cannot praise him there either. Praise of Yhwh is praise of and in his presence.

The real horror of Sheol emerges here, not as a place of terror (or of demon infestation) but of a total inability to praise Yhwh.