The Yod stanza (vv. 17, 18), like the He and Vav stanzas (vv. 7-10), passes to confidence for the future. The correspondence is very close, but the two verses of this stanza represent the four of the earlier ones; thus ver. 17 answers to vv. 7 and 8, while ver. 18 is the representative of vv. 9 and 10. In ver. 17 the "return to Sheol" is equivalent to destruction. In one view, men who cease to be may be regarded as going back to original nothingness, as in Psalm xc. 3. Sheol is not here a place of punishment, but is the dreary dwelling of the dead, from the gates of which the psalmist had been brought up. Reduction to nothingness and yet a shadowy, dim life or death-in-life will certainly be the end of the wicked. The psalmist's experience in his past deliverance entitles him to generalise thus. To forget God is the sure way to be forgotten. The reason for the certain destruction of the nations who forget God and for the psalmist's assurance of it is (ver. 18) the confidence he has that "the needy shall not always be forgotten." That confidence corresponds precisely to vv. 9, 10, and also looks back to the "hath remembered" and "not forgotten" of ver. 12. They who remember God are remembered by Him; and their being remembered--_i.e._, by deliverance--necessitates the wicked's being forgotten, and those who are forgotten by God perish. The second clause of ver. 18 echoes the other solemn word of doom from vv. 3-6. There the fate of the evil-doers was set forth as "perishing"; their very memory was to "perish." But the "expectation of the poor shall not perish." Apparently fragile and to the eye of sense unsubstantial as a soap-bubble, the devout man's hope is more solid than the most solid-seeming realities, and will outlast them all.