Ps. 88.3 (sated with troubles)

For my soul / is sated with troubles
and my life / is brought near to Sheol. 

We mentioned in the opening how the psalmist will oscillate between conflicting images. Here, we see how he combines in a single image this troubling dynamic. He says his soul is “sated with troubles.” Typically, a soul that is ‘sated’ is so with “good things”, indicating a type of experience of plenty, fullness and completion. Here, however, the soul is ‘sated’ with troubles. It is as if his soul has been nourished by troubles. On one level this hardly seems possible. Troubles can never ‘sate’ the soul, but only drain it of strength, leaving it hungry and withered. In order to grasp the full impact of this, we need to return to the opening verses. There, we saw that the psalmist is haunted by a sense that he is ‘not heard’ by Yhwh. That, although he is ‘before you’, his prayers do not seem to be catching Yhwh’s attention. In other words, there is a deep sense of emptiness and barrenness between him and Yhwh, a chasm that he is attempting to get Yhwh to cross. Now, however, when he moves into describing his own situation, he resorts to images of ‘fullness’; he is ‘sated’ with troubles. Further, although nightly he is ‘before you’ he is now “brought near to Sheol”. There is a sense in the psalmist of his simultaneously being acknowledged by God and utterly ignored, of his being the complete object of his attention and being “cut off from your hand”, of being both completely empty and sated. There is not, I think, a way of resolving this duality and tension. It is the experience of one approaching Sheol.