Psalms 129
What Happens in This Chapter
Israel is told to speak up about a long history of attacks that began when the nation was young, and to say that the attackers never won. The psalm pictures that suffering as plowing across the speaker's back, and credits the LORD, who is righteous, with cutting the ropes of the wicked. The rest of the psalm asks that everyone who hates Zion be turned back in shame, like rooftop grass that dries up before it can grow, so that no harvester gathers it and no passerby greets it with a blessing.
1"They have attacked me again and again since I was young." Let Israel say it now.
1Many a time have they afflicted me from my youth, may Israel now say:
The "me" here is Israel itself, speaking as though the nation were a single person; "from my youth" means from the nation's earliest days. The line is written as a call and response, a leader says the words, and the assembled people are invited to repeat them.
2"They have attacked me again and again since I was young. But they have not beaten me."
2Many a time have they afflicted me from my youth: yet they have not prevailed against me.
3Plowmen plowed across my back. They cut their furrows long.
3The plowers plowed upon my back: they made long their furrows.
A picture of being beaten: the long, parallel welts left by a whip on a person's back are compared to the furrows a plow cuts across a field. The image also carries the sense of being worked over like ground under somebody else's tools.
4The LORD does what is right. He has cut the ropes of the wicked apart.
4The LORD is righteous: he hath cut asunder the cords of the wicked.
"Cords" here is deliberately open. It can mean the ropes with which oppressors bound their captive, or, keeping the picture of verse 3 going, the harness straps of the plow team, cut so the plowing stops.
5May everyone who hates Zion be put to shame and driven back.
5Let them all be confounded and turned back that hate Zion.
Zion was originally the fortified hill in Jerusalem; the name came to stand for the whole city, its temple, and the people who belonged to it. To hate Zion is to be an enemy of Israel.
6May they be like the grass that sprouts on a flat roof, which dries up before it can grow.
6Let them be as the grass upon the housetops, which withereth afore it groweth up:
Roofs in this part of the world were flat and surfaced with packed earth, used as living and working space. Windblown seed sprouted there readily, but the layer of soil was too thin to hold water, so the shoots died in the sun within days.
7That grass never fills a reaper's hand, and it never fills the arms of the one who ties the bundles.
7Wherewith the mower filleth not his hand; nor he that bindeth sheaves his bosom.
This describes how grain was harvested by hand: the reaper grabbed a bunch of stalks in one fist and cut them, and a second worker gathered the cut stalks against his chest in armfuls to tie into sheaves. Roof grass is too short and too sparse for either grip: there is nothing there to take hold of.
8And no one walking past says to them, "May the LORD bless you. We bless you in the name of the LORD."
8Neither do they which go by say, The blessing of the LORD be upon you: we bless you in the name of the LORD.
Passers-by customarily called out a blessing to people working a harvest, and the workers called one back; the same exchange appears in Ruth 2:4. Nobody offers it here because there is no harvest to bless, the greeting is missing along with the crop.
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