Psalm 88 has been a huge comfort to me over the years, as I know it has to many other Christians. There is something paradoxically comforting in the presence of such a black Psalm in the Psalter. A Psalm that truly records life as we feel and experience it, without embarrasment, without contradition to the other Psalms that step back to see life from God’s perspective.
There is, of course, much debate over the title.
“A Song. A Psalm of the Sons of Korah. To the Choirmaster: According to Mahalath Leannoth. A Maskil of Heman the Ezrahite.”
The debate comes from the fact that this is the only Psalm to have a double title. “A Psalm of the Sons of Korah … A Maskil of Heman the Ezrahite”.
1. One common suggestion is that the second ascription was incorporated by a scribe from Psalm 89 by mistake; it is left in modern English translations because it seems the incorporation occured so early that it is not unfair to treat it as original.
(To me, that explanation does not threaten the inerrancy of Scripture at all. We accept the OT Scriptures as authoritative because Jesus did; we therefore seek to submit to the Scriptures he submitted to. If he read Psalm 88 with a double title, then so must we. The Holy Spirit superintended the work of all the human authors, editors and compilers who gave us the OT that Jesus had. That process was not a straight forward matter of dictating the final text to some highly trusted individual. Rather, the Spirit worked through the personalities and motivations of the authors, as well as the politics and complications of the day. The process of writing various drafts to be reworked by later generations was the means that the Spirit used to ensure we got the Scriptures he wanted. Clearly the Spirit wants us to have Psalm 88 with this double title, and if he used a tired scribe’s copying error to give us that, so much the better. This is the same Spirit who (in conjunction with the Father and the Son) used the murder of an innocent Jew to save the world.)
2. Another explanation is that offered by Derek Kidner in his Psalms 73-150 (Tyndale Old Testament Commentaries)
Either way, we have a Psalm that links back to 87 and forwards to 89.
And I am profoundly grateful for that. Regardless of how this title came about, the Spirit has told us to make sure we read Psalm 87 and Psalm 89 when we read Psalm 88. So 88 is a Psalm that is honest, and very much from the perspective of life as we experience it. But 88 is also a Psalm that is tied firmly into its context; so we are to read it in the light of the truths of God’s commitment to Zion and God’s eternal steadfast love.
Praise God for such honest, anchored prayers in our Bible
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