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For among the dead who remembers you?
    In the netherworld who sings your praises?[a]
I am exhausted from my sighing;
    every night I flood my bed with my tears,
    and I soak my couch with my weeping.
My eyes grow dim because of my grief;
    they are worn out[b] because of all my foes.

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Footnotes

  1. Psalm 6:6 The psalmist offers a motive for God to save him from death: it is the living who praise him. The netherworld was viewed as the place where the souls of the dead had a kind of shadowy existence, with no activity or lofty emotion. Just what that existence entailed at any given Old Testament period is difficult to gauge until the second century B.C. It is then that the sacred Books begin to speak more clearly about life after death (see Wis 3; Dan 12:1-3).
  2. Psalm 6:8 Eyes grow dim . . . worn out: a sign of failing strength (see Ps 38:11; 1 Sam 14:27, 29; Jer 14:6) or sorrow in affliction (see Pss 31:10; 88:10; Job 17:7; Lam 2:11) or dashed hopes (see Pss 69:4; 119:82, 123; Deut 28:32; Isa 38:14).