Tool Beta
Hebrew and Greek Without Learning Either
A walk through Genesis, the Psalms, and John, plus the key Hebrew and Greek words worth knowing. Each card is a place the English Bibles part company, and what in the Hebrew or Greek made them.
Psalm 88:5
Free among the dead, like the slain that lie in the grave. Chophshi ordinarily means released or liberated, an odd, bitter word choice for death.
Psalm 88:5, in every translation this tool compares.
English free among the dead sounds almost like a comfort, freedom from earthly troubles. The Hebrew word's ordinary sense, released or liberated, applied to the dead, has struck many readers as bitterly ironic rather than comforting, and scholars disagree sharply about what specific, grim idea the psalmist actually means by it.
Because free among the dead uses a word, chophshi, that ordinarily means released or liberated, a strange, even bitter description of death that scholars read in several different, unresolved ways, none of them simply meaning free in any positive sense.
The King James reads free among the dead, following chophshi's ordinary sense. Some modern versions read forsaken, abandoned, or cast off, reading the word's application to death as inherently bitter rather than literally about freedom.
חָפְשִׁי chophshi (freed, released) · H2670
Chophshi ordinarily describes a freed slave or someone released from obligation, a positive term everywhere else it occurs. Applied to the dead here, proposals range from freed from God's obligations and no longer able to serve or praise Him, to stripped, like a corpse looted on a battlefield, to a reading connecting the word to a term for a leper's isolated house, marking the psalmist, or the dead generally, as ritually cut off. No single proposal has won full scholarly consensus.
English free carries entirely positive connotations; if the Hebrew word is being used ironically or in some specialized, grim sense scholars still debate, the plain English rendering can accidentally make the verse sound comforting when it may be doing the opposite, describing utter abandonment.
When an ordinarily positive word is applied to a grim or negative subject, resist smoothing the translation into straightforward positive English. The friction between the word's normal sense and its dark context is very likely the point, not an accident to resolve.
Free among the dead keeps chophshi's ordinary sense and lets the reader feel the strangeness of applying freedom-language to death. Forsaken, abandoned, or stripped resolve the friction into more straightforwardly negative English, at the cost of losing the word's genuinely ironic, unsettling original ambiguity.
- chophshi's ordinary sense, a freed slave: Exodus 21:2; Deuteronomy 15:12
- Multiple unresolved scholarly proposals for its sense here: stripped, abandoned, ritually cut off
