Psalms 129

The psalm opens by saying its hardest sentence and then immediately saying it again: Many a time have they afflicted me from my youth… Many a time have they afflicted me from my youth. The doubling is the whole tone of the song. It is the sound of a survivor steadying themselves on a fact - saying it once to get it out, saying it twice to be sure it can be borne. And it is spoken not by an individual only but by a whole people: may Israel now say. One voice gathers generations of trouble into a single testimony. Two things in the line deserve weight. First, many a time - this was not one bad season but a long succession of them, blow after blow with scarcely a pause between. Second, from my youth - the affliction goes back as far as memory reaches, to the earliest days, so that there has hardly been a time of life without it. This is the honesty the Psalms are famous for. The song does not begin by minimizing the suffering or hurrying past it to a happy ending. It looks the long history of hurt full in the face and names it out loud - and only then, having told the truth, does it move toward hope.

After the plough and the furrows, the psalm sets down the sentence that holds everything else up: The LORD is righteous: he hath cut asunder the cords of the wicked (v. 4). Notice where the deliverance is grounded. It is not credited to the sufferer's toughness, nor to the enemy growing tired, nor to luck. It is grounded in a quality of God: the LORD is righteous. Because He is just, He will not let the wicked hold their victim forever. The cords are the ropes of the oppressor - the harness by which a ploughman drives his team, the bonds by which a captor holds a prisoner, the rigging of every scheme meant to keep the afflicted under control. To cut them asunder is to sever them clean through, so the team is unhitched, the prisoner loosed, the scheme undone. The image answers verse 3 exactly: the same back that was driven like a beast under the plough is set free when God cuts the harness. And the cutting is an act of righteousness - not an arbitrary rescue, but justice doing what justice does, refusing to let cruelty have the final word. The whole confidence of the psalm rests here: the reason affliction does not prevail is that there is a righteous God who, in His own time, cuts the cords.¹

The third verse gives the suffering a body, and the image is hard to shake: The plowers plowed upon my back: they made long their furrows. Picture a field in spring - the ploughman leaning into the blade, the iron biting the soil, the long straight furrows opened one after another down the length of the ground. Now hear the psalm put a human back where the field should be. The oppressors are the ploughmen; the people are the soil; the wounds are the furrows, dragged the full length of the back. It is a picture of being treated not as a person but as ground - something to be torn open, cut into, and used for someone else's harvest. And the detail they made long their furrows tells you it was not a single stroke but a thorough, deliberate work, the whole field worked over. The Psalms often reach for the body to say what the soul feels, and here the language is almost unbearably physical because the affliction was. Yet set this verse beside the one before it - yet they have not prevailed against me - and a strange dignity appears. The back is scarred; the voice is not silenced. The furrows are real and the survival is real, and the psalm refuses to let either one cancel the other.

The psalm now turns from what was done to it toward those who did it: Let them all be confounded and turned back that hate Zion (v. 5). It is important to see exactly what is being asked and what is not. The prayer is not a plan for personal revenge, and it does not call down a list of tortures. It asks two things: that the haters of Zion be confounded - brought to shame, their schemes exposed as empty - and that they be turned back, the way an attacking army is repelled and sent retreating from the wall it could not breach. And note carefully who the enemies are: not those who have wronged the psalmist personally, but those who hate Zion - who set themselves against the city of God and the purposes bound up with it. The petition leaves the doing of it to God; it is a request, not a seizing of the sword. This is the shape of the Old Testament's honest prayers against evil: the sufferer brings the longing for justice into the open, lays it before God, and asks Him to act - rather than taking the matter into their own hands. The cords were cut by God in verse 4; here, too, the turning back of Zion's haters is placed in His hands, not the petitioner's.

The prayer is given an image drawn from everyday life in the ancient world: Let them be as the grass upon the housetops, which withereth afore it groweth up (v. 6). The roofs of the houses were flat, packed with earth, and after the rains a thin fuzz of grass would sprout up there - rootless, shallow, with no real soil beneath it. On the open field such grass might grow tall and ripen; up on the baked rooftop, exposed to the sun with nowhere to send a root, it shrivels almost as soon as it appears, withereth afore it groweth up. The picture is not violent; it is futile. The psalm is not asking that Zion's haters be hacked down at harvest but that they come to nothing on their own - that their hostility prove as fruitless and short-lived as grass that never had the depth to live. Verse 7 carries the figure to its end: Wherewith the mower filleth not his hand; nor he that bindeth sheaves his bosom. When harvest comes, there is simply nothing there to gather - no handful for the reaper, no armful for the one who binds the sheaves. The opposition to God's city, for all its long furrows and loud threats, ends as an empty harvest: much show, no fruit, gathered by no one.³

The psalm closes on a quiet, almost mournful note: Neither do they which go by say, The blessing of the LORD be upon you: we bless you in the name of the LORD (v. 8). To picture it, you have to know the custom. When travellers passed a field at harvest, it was the ordinary, neighbourly thing to call out a blessing to the reapers - the blessing of the LORD be upon you - and for the workers to answer it back, we bless you in the name of the LORD (something close to it is recorded in Boaz's field in Ruth 2:4). It was the warm exchange of a community at work under God. But there is no such greeting at the rooftop ‘harvest,’ because there is no harvest - nothing to bless, no reapers to bless. The absence of the blessing is the final stroke of the picture: the haters of Zion are left outside the circle of God's good word, not because a curse has been hurled at them, but because their way of barren hostility produces nothing anyone could bless. It is a sober ending, and a restrained one. The psalm does not gloat. It simply observes that a life set against the city of God comes, in the end, to a field where no blessing is spoken - and it leaves that outcome, like everything else, in the hands of the righteous LORD.