Free At Last (2)

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 3^rd 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 10^th 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.

Addition: Perhaps now we understand why the rabbis taught that the yetzer ha’ra was an essential part of being human.

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.