Catholic Commentary
The Cry from the Depths: Mortal Distress and Prayer
4The cords of death surrounded me. The floods of ungodliness made me afraid.5The cords of Sheol were around me. The snares of death came on me.6In my distress I called on Yahweh, and cried to my God. He heard my voice out of his temple. My cry before him came into his ears.
Psalms 18:4–6 depicts the psalmist's experience of overwhelming distress and mortal danger, using the imagery of death's cords and snares as instruments that have surrounded and entrapped him within Sheol, the Hebrew underworld. Facing this humanly irrecoverable situation, he calls upon Yahweh by name, invoking his covenantal relationship with God as the sole means of salvation from death's domain.
Prayer is born not in comfort but in drowning — when you have run out of rope, you finally reach for God's name.
Psalms 18:4 — "The cords of death surrounded me"
The Hebrew ḥeḇlê māwet (rendered "cords" or sometimes "waves" of death, depending on whether one reads ḥeḇel as "rope" or follows the parallel in 2 Samuel 22:5 where the imagery is of torrents) conjures a vivid double image: death as both a hunter who casts nets and snares, and as a flash flood that engulfs. In the ancient Near Eastern imagination, death was not merely an event but an active, quasi-personal power — a realm with appetite. The psalmist does not say he approached death; he says death's cords surrounded him, the verb 'āpap meaning to encircle completely, leaving no exit. This is not poetic exaggeration but a precise theological claim: the situation is humanly irrecoverable.
Psalms 18:5 — "The cords of Sheol were around me"
Sheol in Hebrew thought is the shadowy underworld, the place of the dead, characterized by silence, forgetfulness, and separation from the living God (cf. Ps 6:5; 88:10–12). The parallelism with verse 4 is intentional and cumulative: "death" and "Sheol" are not identical, and the poet deploys both to intensify the picture. Where verse 4 speaks of death as an active hunter, verse 5 speaks of Sheol as a geography — its "cords" (moqšê, snares or traps) already closing around the psalmist's feet. The image is of a man who has not merely glimpsed death but is already partially inside its domain. The Septuagint renders Sheol as Hadēs, which is significant for early Christian reading, as it directly links this verse to the Apostles' Creed's affirmation that Christ "descended into hell" (descendit ad inferos).
Psalms 18:6 — "In my distress I called on Yahweh"
The Hebrew ṣar ("distress," literally "narrowness," a constriction that crushes) is the exact opposite of the merḥāḇ, the "broad place" to which the Lord ultimately brings the psalmist (v. 19). The architecture of the psalm is already present in microcosm: the narrowness of death → the cry → the wideness of rescue. The act of calling (qārāʾ) on Yahweh's name is itself theologically laden. To call on the divine name is not mere prayer in a generic sense; it is an act of covenantal appeal, invoking the relationship established at Sinai, the name revealed at the burning bush (Exod 3:14–15). The psalmist throws his entire being against that relationship as the only fixed point in a world swallowed by chaos.
Typological and Spiritual Senses
The Fathers read this passage with relentless Christological intensity. In the allegorical sense, David is a type of Christ in his Passion: the cords of death are the bonds of the Crucifixion; Sheol is the tomb and the descent among the dead; and the cry of verse 6 reverberates with Gethsemane ("Father, if it be possible…" Matt 26:39) and the cry of dereliction (Ps 22:1/Matt 27:46). St. Augustine, in his Enarrationes in Psalmos, insists that Christ prays this psalm in persona of his Body, the Church — meaning the distress is also ours, taken up into his.
In the tropological (moral) sense, these verses describe the interior journey of every soul in serious sin or suffering: to reach the bottom of one's own resources — the "cords of Sheol" — and to cry out rather than fall silent, is itself an act of faith and the beginning of conversion.
Catholic tradition uniquely illuminates these verses through the twin doctrines of the descensus ad inferos and the theology of intercessory prayer rooted in covenantal relationship.
The Descent into Hell. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (§632–637) teaches that Christ truly descended into the realm of the dead — not to suffer there, but as conqueror, to bring the light of salvation to those who had died before his coming. Psalm 18:5 ("The cords of Sheol were around me") was read by Patristic commentators — including Origen, Athanasius, and Cyril of Alexandria — as a foreshadowing of Christ's experience of death in its fullness. The CCC (§630) notes that "Jesus, like all men, experienced death and in his soul joined the others in the realm of the dead." That Christ bore the ḥeḇlê māwet is not incidental to salvation; it is its very mechanism.
Prayer from the Abyss. St. John Chrysostom (Homilies on the Psalms) observes that the cry of verse 6 represents the perfection of petitionary prayer: it is uttered when all human supports have collapsed. This aligns with CCC §2559, which defines prayer as "the raising of one's mind and heart to God or the requesting of good things from God," noting that it begins when we recognize our poverty before him. St. Thérèse of Lisieux, in Story of a Soul, describes her own spiritual crises in language that echoes Psalm 18 — she called the experience of spiritual darkness her own "cords of Sheol," out of which she learned to cry rather than calculate.
The Divine Name as Anchor. The specific invocation of Yahweh carries the full weight of Catholic teaching on the sanctity of the divine name (CCC §2143–2149). To call on that name in extremis is the highest use of speech, the act for which the human person is ultimately made.
Contemporary Catholics often encounter a cultural pressure — even within parish life — to present suffering as already-resolved, to move quickly past the anguish to the consolation. Psalm 18:4–6 refuses that evasion. These verses give permission, even mandate, to dwell in the cry before the answer comes.
For someone experiencing serious illness, the collapse of a marriage, addiction, or the death of a loved one, the spiritual discipline these verses teach is this: do not manage the distress before bringing it to God — bring it raw, bring it whole. The cry of verse 6 is not the cry of someone who has already made peace; it is the cry of someone drowning. That is when Yahweh hears.
Practically, a Catholic might use these verses as a framework for Eucharistic Adoration or the Liturgy of the Hours in times of crisis — praying verse 4 slowly, naming the specific "cords" that encircle them (fear, shame, illness, grief), then verse 5, identifying what feels like a descent from life, and finally verse 6, speaking aloud, as an act of the will, the name of God. The prayer journal tradition of Ignatian spirituality offers a natural home for this kind of structured lament.