Ps. 88.10-12 (Pt. 2; the impossible question)

Do you do wonders / for the dead?
Do even the Rephaim / rise up and praise you?
Is your loyal-love / declared in the grave?
You faithfulness / in Abaddon?
Are your wonders known / in the darkness?
Your righteousness / in the Land of Forgetfulness?  

The preceding reflection focused mostly on how these questions work thematically within the psalm. Here, I want to focus on the questions themselves. On one level, they seem rather straightforward. When we look more closely though, we can detect a certain pattern. God’s power, or light, is immediately contrasted with the darkness of death and Sheol: wonders—dead; Rephaim—praise you; loyal-love—the grave; faithfulness—Abaddon; wonders—darkness; righteousness—Land of Forgetfulness. The stark contrast is important—it points to the utter incongruity between God’s power/light and the realm of Sheol and death. These two realities are not, ever, to meet. Perhaps more important is the fact that by their contrast, they reveal each other. What I mean is—God’s ‘wonders’ are the antithesis of ‘the dead’. God’s ‘wonders’ are life-giving, redemptive, and performed for those who are ‘the living’. The realm of the living is the ‘place’ in which God’s wonders are performed and, as such, the place were hope resides. For the dead, by contrast, all wonders cease. It is a place ‘without hope’. There is something unalterable about this vision; a threshold that is crossed in death that represents a qualitatively different realm. Death shuts a door to Yhwh’s wonders. The point, I think, though is not on ‘death’ as such but on the fact that, for the psalmist, all ‘goodness’ is, in a sense, completely and utterly grouped ‘with the living’. We must realize that it is not the ‘place’ as such that terrifies him but its effect—as a place without the wonders of Yhwh, without his loyal-love and faithfulness, a place where one cannot praise him. In other words, the darkness of Sheol is precisely the absence of communion with Yhwh. ‘Life’ is conceived as a liturgical act of praise to Yhwh and recounting of his acts toward his people. ‘Life’ is not neutral or ambivalent. It is, always already, a turning toward Yhwh in adoration. The light that this reality casts upon death, however, is as absolute. It is because communion with Yhwh, in life, has an almost absolute glory for the living that death is robbed of any worth. Death is utter darkness, silence, and the complete inability to recount Yhwh’s wonders or works. Arguably, the name cannot even be mentioned in ‘the grave’. It is the “land of forgetfulness”—either that land whose inhabitants have forgotten Yhwh, or the land that is forgotten by Yhwh. It is the clear reality of this ‘shadow’ cast by life that is haunting the psalmist—he recoils from it. And, even though he knows that the answer to all his questions is a resounding “No”, he can’t refrain from asking nonetheless. In a very odd way, these questions speak to the powerful goodness of life, as an enactment of communion with Yhwh, and of the psalmist almost inability to conceive of existence outside of that realm.