Afflicted From My Youth
1 A Song of Ascents. Many times they have afflicted me from my youth up. Let Israel now say: 2 many times they have afflicted me from my youth up, yet they have not prevailed against me. 3 The plowers plowed on my back. They made their furrows long. 4 Yahweh is righteous. He has cut apart the cords of the wicked. 5 Let them be disappointed and turned backward, all those who hate Zion. 6 Let them be as the grass on the housetops, which withers before it grows up, 7 with which the reaper doesn’t fill his hand, nor he who binds sheaves, his bosom. 8 Neither do those who go by say, “The blessing of Yahweh be on you. We bless you in Yahweh’s name.”
A nation with scars down its back says the attackers never finished the job.
A Song of Ascents. Many times they have afflicted me from my youth up. Let Israel now say:
The congregation is invited to say it, as in the hundred and twenty-fourth psalm, and the line is then repeated with the clause that matters added: yet they have not prevailed against me Psalms 129:2.
The nation's youth was Egypt, and the psalm's claim is about a pattern rather than an episode. Many times, from the beginning, and never successfully.
The plowers plowed on my back. They made their furrows long.
The most brutal image in the Songs of Ascents. A back scarred by whipping is described as a field under the plow, and the furrows are long — the strokes went the whole way. It is the sentence Isaiah's servant passage will use of one man Isaiah 53:5, applied here to a nation.
Yahweh is righteous. He has cut apart the cords of the wicked.
The deliverance is described as cutting harness. Whatever the wicked were using to hold the plow to the ox, it has been severed, and the work has stopped.
Let them be as the grass on the housetops, which withers before it grows up,
The curse asked for is unusually mild and unusually exact. Roofs in that country were flat and packed with earth, and seed blew onto them and sprouted after rain — with an inch of soil and no depth, it died in days. Nobody weeds a roof. It simply comes to nothing.
with which the reaper doesn’t fill his hand, nor he who binds sheaves, his bosom.
The picture is followed to its end: no harvest, nothing to gather, nothing to carry.
Neither do those who go by say, “The blessing of Yahweh be on you. We bless you in Yahweh’s name.”
The customary greeting called across to men working in a field, and here nobody says it, because there is nothing happening worth greeting. The psalm's harshest wish is that the enemies of Zion should be ignored by passers-by.
settled What this mark means