Psalms 88:10

10. Wilt thou show wonders to the dead A wonder, singular, a token, a proof of saving power and favour. God’s “wonders,” for the edification of living men, are shown to the living, not to the dead. Why, then, should he be left to die?

Shall the dead arise and praise thee The “dead,” here, does not refer to dead bodies, but to disembodied spirits, or, as the ancient idea was, the shades or manes of the dead; and the rising must not be understood of a resurrection of the body, but of the rising up, as from a recumbent posture, of the shades or spirits of the departed in their abode in sheol. רפאים , ( rephaim,) here translated dead, is a different word from “dead” in the previous clause, and is the term for giants, (as Genesis 14:5; Deuteronomy 2:11; Deuteronomy 2:20,) and the climax seems to require the sense of mighty dead, or shades of the mighty, as in Isaiah 14:9: “Sheol… raiseth for thee the mighty dead, all the great chiefs of the earth.” Lowth. These spirits were living, but had no sensible connexion with this world. The sense, therefore, is this: “Wilt thou produce a wonder to the dead? Shall the [spirits of the] mighty dead rise up [in their abode in sheol] and praise thee?” Nothing could make it more clear that the Hebrews considered living men to be debarred all direct intercommunion with the dead, so that the latter could not rise up and declare to the living what are the divine dispensations to them, and thus cause their experiences to become salutary to the living. And hence the argument all along implies, that if help were not quickly shown to the suppliant psalmist, while yet numbered with the living, the moral effect of his deliverance would be lost, and God would not be glorified by it. As to the supposed adverse bearing of this and other texts on the belief of man’s immortality, see on Psalms 115:17, and the references there made. We say with Bishop Alexander: “How could Christianity, all quivering with the hopes and fears of another life, have issued from Judaism, if Judaism had possessed nothing of the kind?”