Psalms 88:12

12. The dark Same as “grave.” So αδης , hades, (answering everywhere to שׁאול , sheol,) is compounded of α , privative, ( not,) and ειδω , ( to see,) not to see, unseen, and means the world I do not see, the unseen world. The same is called darkness in the text.

Land of forgetfulness So called because the dead, after a few generations, are generally forgotten from the records of the living. This is true to fact in all ages with the masses of mankind. And is not death, in its physical aspect, still viewed, under the Christian religion, in the same chilling and gloomy light? Even the Saviour said: “The night cometh, when no man can work.” John 9:4. To the instincts of our nature death must ever be saddening and abhorrent. Its terrors are swallowed up only through faith and hope in the infinite “beyond” a moral victory over what is still, per se, an unchanged natural evil. “The psalter would be incomplete without expressions of the sadness which comes with the prospect of death.” Bishop Alexander. Without this a great moral lesson would be lost, and the Bible would be untrue to itself and to nature.