The Bible Commentaries and Others: Valley of the Shadow of Death

Valley of the Shadow of Death

VALLEY OF THE SHADOW OF DEATH There are many OT instances of the phrase “shadow of death” (Heb. ṣalmawet) in the KJV (e.g., Job 3:5; 10:21, 22; 24:17; 34:22; 38:17; Amos 5:8; Jer. 2:6; 13:16), but the most influential uses of the phrase are in Ps. 107:10, Isa. 9:2, and, of course, Ps. 23:4, with its “valley of the shadow of death.”

A rabbinic midrash on this latter passage identifies the valley as an allusion “to chastisement in Gehenna, whose fire God will cool for me.” St. Irenaeus, in his Against All the Heresies, likewise alludes to the valley of the shadow with reference to hell, in this case harrowed by the resurrected Christ: “The Lord ‘went away in the midst of the shadow of death’ where the souls of the dead were.” Luther, in his commentary on Ps. 23, makes a more specific address to the context of the phrase, using the image of the valley as an occasion to offer practical advice for life before the grave:

Those who are the Lord’s sheep are surrounded by much danger and misfortune. ... Here you must not be guarded by your eyes or follow your reason as the world does. The world cannot see this rich, splendid comfort of the Christians, that they want nothing. ... Listen to your shepherd.

Calvin, in his Commentaries, is similarly concerned with the temporal trials of this life: “The faithful ... are nevertheless exposed to many perils. ... When a sheep is walking in a dark valley, only the shepherd’s presence keeps it safe from the attacks of wild beasts or from other accidents” (cf. Inst. 1.17.11; 3.2.21; 3.2.28; 3.13.5).

Marginal notes to the Geneva Bible refer to one who is “in danger of death as ye shepe that wandreth in the darke valley without his shepherd”—perhaps providing a hint for Bunyan’s most famous use of the image. Of Bunyan’s Valley of the Shadow in pt. 2 of Pilgrim’s Progress, certain travelers who have abandoned their pilgrimage report that

the Valley it self ... is as dark as pitch: we also saw there Hobgoblins, Satyrs, and Dragons of the Pit: We heard also in that Valley a continual howling and yelling, as of a People under unutterable misery; who there sat bound in affliction and Irons: and over that Valley hangs the discouraging cloud of confusion, death also doth always spread his wings over it: in a word, it is every wit dreadful, being utterly without Order.

Christian, hearing of such horrors, prudently puts up his sword and turns to “All-Prayer.” The moral drawn from Job 12:22 stresses in paradoxical terms the victory of Providence over the threat posed by the Valley of the Shadow: “He discovereth deep things out of darkness, and bringeth out to light the shadow of death.”

Notable among other literary allusions is the recollection of Chaucer’s Parson (CT 10.177) of Job’s apprehension of the afterlife—“the lond of mysese and of derknesse, where as is the shadwe of deeth, where as ther is noon ordre or ordinaunce, but grisly drede that evere shal laste.” The dying Bosola in Webster’s Duchess of Malfi, thinking rather of life as a kind of living hell, adds a level of angst (and misogyny) to the reference: “O, this gloomy world! / In what a shadow, or deep pit of darkness, / Doth womanish and fearful mankind live!”

The valley of the shadow has an important place in Poe’s Eldorado, an evocative poem about the universality of death. And Shaw’s Major Barbara, abandoning her Salvationist creed, pronounces a secularized version of Bunyan’s paradoxes: the way to life, she says, lies “through the raising of hell to heaven and of man to God, through the unveiling of the eternal light in the Valley of the Shadow.”