Isaiah 38:11

I shall not see the Lord... — The words are eminently characteristic of the cheerless dimness of the Hebrew’s thoughts of death. To St. Paul and those who share his faith death is to “depart, and to be with Christ” (Philippians 1:23), to be “ever with the Lord” (1 Thessalonians 4:17). To Hezekiah, it would seem, the outward worship of the Temple, or possibly, the consciousness of God’s presence in the full activity of brain and heart, was a joy which he could not bear to lose. The spiritual perceptions of the life after death would be spectral and shadowy, like the dead themselves. (Comp. the Greek idea of Hades in Homer (Od. xi. 12-19). It may be noted that the Hebrew for “the Lord” is the shorter, possibly the poetical, form “Jah” (as in Psalms 68:4). The LXX paraphrases “I shall not see the salvation of God.”