Musings on Psalms 30 and Death

Psalms 30:3, 9

“O Jehovah, you have brought up my soul from She′ol itself; You have kept me alive, that I should not go down into the pit…What profit is there in my blood when I go down to the pit? Will the dust laud you? Will it tell of your trueness?”

David here in verse three speaks of two states of being only: being alive on earth and being dead in the “pit.” The pit (death) is the opposite of life—it is cast in a negative light in this Psalm, in contradistinction to life. Life is to be preferred to death; life is the reward for serving and loving Jehovah, NOT heaven or some paradise in a sub division of Sheol.

It is a very temporal and physical view which is reflected all through the Hebrew Scriptures, not just these two. The rewards for faithful obedience were always associated with longer life HERE on the earth; and the punishments were never spoken of or even hinted at being some kind of eternal torture in an afterlife—punishments were always spoken of as simply being the loss of life prematurely HERE.

Rewards and punishments after death were not mentioned by Moses or any of the other writers of the Hebrew Scriptures, which from a modern Christian perspective should be a very odd thing to leave out. How unfair and unjust must God have been not to worn mankind by the mouth of his prophets of the fiery, eternal doom that awaited them should they have disobeyed and rebelled; and how huge of a of an opportunity did God and the prophets miss to encourage their people by the hope of being raised up to heaven with God upon death, should they have remained faithful and obedient? Christians today warmly embrace both of these methods—so why weren’t they good enough for God’s own covenant people, the Jews?

This discrepancy is emphasized even further by verse 9. David says that there is “no profit” in death, and that “dust” cannot laud or speak of Jehovah. This verse is rather strange then if we hold to the notion of a conscious existence after death. If David was going to be conscious and aware of his surroundings and possibly even other dead ones, whether in a waiting room style paradise in God’s sight or in heaven with God, they why wouldn’t there be profit in dying? Why couldn’t he laud and speak of Jehovah? If we hold to the popular theory of a conscious, separate soul, death for David wouldn’t be all that different from his life on Earth!