Charles H. Spurgeon on Psalms 40:2

An horrible pit. Some of the pits referred to in the Bible were prisons, one such I saw at Athens, and another at Rome. To these there were no openings, except a hole at the top, which served for both door and window. The bottoms of these pits were necessarily in a filthy and revolting state, and sometimes deep in mud. He brought me up also out of an horrible pit, out of the miry clay; one of these filthy prisons being in the psalmist's view, in Isa 38:17, called "the pit of corruption, "or putrefaction and filth. John Gadsby.