Free At Last
Abandoned among the dead, like the slain who lie in the grave, whom You no longer remember, and they are cut off from Your hand. Psalm 88:5 NASB
Abandoned – What an interesting choice of words! Sometimes translated “forsaken,” the Hebrew root is the verb ḥāpaš. Here it is ḥopšî, an adjective. What’s interesting is the basic meaning of this term, and its implications. We think of “abandoned” and “forsaken” as horrible situations, and indeed, they are. But what if I told you, “The majority of its sixteen occurrences refer to freedom from slavery.”[1] The Psalmist chooses to view death as freedom! “Sheol is a place where the slave is finally free from his master (Job 3:19), but the ‘freedom’ of death is equated with being cut off from the Lord in the difficult Ps 88:5 [H 6].”[2]
Think of it like this: all your life you’ve been a slave. A slave to debt. A slave to obligations. A slave to your desires. A slave to your needs. The yetzer ha’ra has had a field day with you, driving you from one demand to the next. Do you want to get out of the rat race? Death is escape! The dead don’t pay taxes. In fact, they don’t pay anything at all (if you have a Hebrew worldview based in the Tanakh). Death is the end, period!
Unfortunately, it’s also the end of the relationship with God. It’s freedom from the toils of this world but it’s also absence from God. That’s the second interesting implication here. There is no picture of an afterlife of reward and punishment! After the 3rd Century B.C.E., we might read this verse quite differently. We would probably think the author is talking about being in Hell, about ending up in a place where God is absent. “Abandoned” would push us to think of residence in the afterlife. But that isn’t happening in the 10th Century B.C.E. There’s life with its relationships and activities, and then there’s death, without relationships and activities. Death doesn’t send me to a place of reward or punishment. It simply cuts me off from everything. I am no longer remembered, even by God. I’m free—free at last—but what kind of freedom is it? My tasks disappear along with my connections. Perhaps the insight we need to draw from this little verse is this: we are what we do. If we take away all the doing, if we remove all the debts and obligations and promises and needs and desires, we are free, but we are also cut off. We stop being.
Maybe all those yetzer ha’ra motivations aren’t as bad as we thought.
Topical Index: ḥopšî, free, slavery, afterlife, death, yetzer ha’ra, abandoned, Psalm 88:5
[1] Wolf, H. (1999). 717 חָפַשׁ. R. L. Harris, G. L. Archer Jr., & B. K. Waltke (Eds.), Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament (electronic ed., p. 312). Chicago: Moody Press.
[2] Ibid.
Man is nourished for life with God by acting in agreement with Torah, God’s instruction and direction for how that life is to be enacted in the sustaining relationship of life with God. And it is by such acts (in agreement with Torah) that man reciprocates by nourishing the association of God with the world.
The growth of devotedness to God’s intentions and purposes—the elevation and the being of man within the world—depend on whether man is in accord with the will of God. This is described in the varied and sometimes imprecise testimony of Israel about the ways in which the responsibility for creation is to be understood and enacted by human persons summoned to obedience to God’s commands. This is the focus of Israel’s testimony in the world, and it is as those who bear witness through this testimony (ideally, but not always, a testimony of the relationship of reciprocal faithfulness)—that Israel provides witness—evidence—that those who live their lives in resistance to the will and purposes of YHVH do damage to the creation.
Yes, death is a sort of macabre freedom from the living enactment of obedience, and in the unencumbered simplicity of ancient Israel’s world view there was no need to discuss the nature of that which comes after life; simply put, in Israel’s testimony of life with God it no longer had a place (or purpose) in the world. Nevertheless, Israel’s testimony is replete with the notion that all human creaturesare held accountable for the maintenance of life as God intends, a healthy life in the world, free of the concern of death.
Job is perhaps the quintessential human person. He is not specifically identified as an Israelite, yet he exemplifies the concrete ethical actions of a human person who is accountable and obedient, reflective of Israel’s best “Torah thinking,” wherein the substance of Torah commandments—to live lives for the sake of the well-being of the word—demonstrates the accountability all human creatures have for the maintenance of healthy life in the world (see Job 31).
Now hear what Job proclaims concerning that ‘after life’:
“For I know that my Redeemer lives, and at the last he will stand upon the earth. And after my skin has been thus destroyed, yet in my flesh I shall see God, whom I shall see for myself, and my eyes shall behold, and not another. My heart faints within me! If you say, ‘How we will pursue him!’ and, ‘The root of the matter is found in him,’ be afraid of the sword, for wrath brings the punishment of the sword, that you may know there is a judgment.” (Job 19:25-29)