a dark place: a region of darkness one is put into, cannot escape, or tries to hide inside
This word is not the ordinary word for darkness. It is a place word, built to name a location that darkness fills rather than the darkness itself. Where the common word points to darkness as a quality (the dark over the deep at creation, the dark that stands opposite light), this word points to a spot on the map: a pit, a hideout, a grave, a stretch of ground no one can see across. All seven times it appears, it is somewhere a person is placed, trapped, or concealed, and six of those seven times it follows the little word for "in," fixing it firmly as a place.
Across its handful of uses the word keeps that single locative force but shines it on three kinds of place. Most often it is the realm of the dead, the grave into which a sufferer feels God has already lowered him while he still breathes. Twice it is a hideout of human wickedness, whether the ruined corners of a broken land where violent men lurk or the back room where schemers plot, telling themselves no one sees. Once it is simply the trackless dark a blind person cannot cross, which God promises to turn into light.
The three uses are not separate meanings but one image seen from three angles, and they share a point the biblical writers press hard: a dark place is exactly where human sight fails and God's does not. The grave, the conspirator's room, the blind traveler's path are all beyond human reach, yet God alone can see into each and act there. The word becomes a way of naming the limit of human vision and the reach of God's.
Nuances
How the final word of Psalm 88, "dark place," attaches to the preceding "my companions," and whether it means the friends are replaced by darkness or have died into the grave.
- majorityA stark statement: darkness is now the speaker's only companion, the dark place standing in for the friends God has removed.; H.-J. Kraus, Psalms 60–150 (Fortress, 1989); F.-L. Hossfeld and E. Zenger, Psalms 2: 51–100, Hermeneia (Fortress, 2005); M. Tate, Psalms 51–100, WBC 20 (Word, 1990)
- minorityA statement of place: the speaker's acquaintances have gone into the dark place, that is, into the grave, leaving him the lone survivor.; M. Dahood, Psalms II, AB 17 (Doubleday, 1968)
- contestedThe unresolved wording is deliberate artistry that refuses to settle either way.; N. deClaissé-Walford, R. Jacobson, and B. L. Tanner, The Book of Psalms, NICOT (Eerdmans, 2014); R. Alter, The Book of Psalms (Norton, 2007)