John Calvin Commentary Psalms 88:3

"For my soul is full of troubles, And my life draweth nigh unto Sheol." — Psalms 88:3 (ASV)

For my soul is filled with troubles. These words contain the excuse that the prophet pleads for the excess of his grief. They imply that his continued crying did not proceed from softness or unmanly weakness of spirit; rather, a due consideration of his condition would show that the immense accumulation of miseries with which he was oppressed was such that it might justly extort these lamentations from him.

Nor does he speak of only one kind of calamity, but of calamities so heaped one upon another that his heart was filled with sorrow until it could contain no more. He next particularly affirms that his life was not far from the grave. He pursues this idea and expresses it in more significant terms in the following verse, where he complains that he was, as it were, dead.

Although he still breathed among the living, yet the many deaths with which he was threatened on all sides were to him so many graves by which he expected to be swallowed up in a moment. And he seems to use the word גבר , geber, which is derived from גבר , gabar, he prevailed, or was strong, in preference to the word that simply signifies man, — to show more emphatically that his distresses were so great and crushing that they were sufficient to bring down the strongest man.