Ps. 88.4-5 (Sheol's contradiction)

I am reckoned / with those going to the Pit
I have become like a strong man / without strength
set free / among the dead;
like the slain / who lie in a common grave
whom you remember / no longer
those who are cut off / from your hand. 

The duality of the psalmist’s experience is something have already emphasized. The images he uses to describe his condition are often mixed. He simultaneously experiences emptiness and satiation, closeness and distance, attention and aloofness. Along these lines, one thing we will see later in the psalm is the psalmist’s sense of total isolation from those who are close to him, friends and lover alike. He is completely alone as he approaches the Pit. Here, however, the psalmist finds a ‘community’: “I am reckoned with those going to the Pit”. He is like those (plural) who lie in a common grave; those ‘cut off from your hand’ (vs. 5). It is a mockery of everything he is petitioning Yhwh to rectify. What he seeks is the goodness of human company; what he is heading toward is the unholy and ‘forgotten’ community of death. Likewise, while his experience of isolation involves a concomitant sense of overpowering constriction, he now describes his journey to Sheol as being “set free”. 

What I think we see is that as he approaches Sheol his entire state of life is becoming horribly inverted. Everything he searches for in life (freedom, community, satiation) he is about to possess in Sheol, but as a dark-blessing, a mock-blessing. It is like some anti-exodus, a ‘freeing into death’. There is an important insight in this: Sheol’s atmosphere is that of God’s absence. In other words, it is not the case that it is simply a ‘place of inversion’. It is a place of inversion because it is the place of God’s absence. One is ‘nourished’ by exile. This is effectively portrayed when the psalmist says he is “like a strong man without strength.” It does not say he is ‘like a man without strength’. He is, rather, intensely aware of the absence he is becoming and heading toward.  This ‘without strength’ is then matched by being ‘remembered no longer’ by Yhwh and being ‘cut off from your hand’. He experiences God’s forgetfulness and ‘being cut off from your hand’. This is key. The psalmist is not looking simply to his own, individual, dissolution and lamenting it. He sees that, but his individual existence is sustained by his being “looked upon by Yhwh”. This is why Sheol is such a horrible place. In Sheol one experiences the absence of Yhwh as if it were a presence, like plant cut off from the sun (or a branch cut off from the vine…). We might put it this way: Sheol is not simply an inversion, as it if were the ‘opposite pole’ of existence. It would be the opposite pole of existence if existence was purely an individual reality and not a relationship with Yhwh. Rather, because life is sustained by and is a relationship with Yhwh, Sheol is a contradiction. It is like a plant’s perpetual awareness of its lack of sun. And the closer one gets to Sheol the more one begins to inhabit and become a contradiction.