Psalms 88:10

Shall the dead arise? ... — These words are not to be taken in the sense of a final resurrection as we understand it. The hope of this had hardly yet dawned on Israel. The underworld is imagined as a vast sepulchre in which the dead lie, each in his place, silent and motionless, and the poet asks how they can rise there to utter the praise of God who has forgotten them (Psalms 88:5). That this is meant, and not a coming forth again into a land of living interests, is shown in the next two verses. (See Notes.)

Dead. — Heb., rephaîm, a word applied also to the gigantic races of Palestine (Deuteronomy 2:11; Deuteronomy 2:20, &c.), but here evidently (as also in Proverbs 2:18; Proverbs 9:18; Proverbs 21:16; Isaiah 14:9; Isaiah 26:19) meaning the dead.

All the passages cited confirm the impression got from this psalm of the Hebrew conception of the state of the dead. They were languid, sickly shapes, lying supine, cut off from all the hopes and interests of the upper air, and even oblivious of them all, but retaining so much of sensation as to render them conscious of the gloomy monotony of death. (Comp. Isaiah 38:18; Sir. 17:27-28; Bar. 2:17.)