Psalm 129

Psalms 129:1-2

The Hebrew title, which this page's text does not show, reads A Song of degrees, another of the fifteen ascent psalms. The opening line is given to Israel to say for itself, may Israel now say, and it is repeated verbatim in verse 2 before the point is made: many a time afflicted from youth, yet they have not prevailed. Henry reads the nation's youth as Egypt, and the repeated line as the settled testimony of a whole history of survival under attack.

Psalms 129:3-4

The affliction is pictured as a field plowed, long furrows cut into the back, a figure the bench reads as scourging, the ridges of the whip standing for the plow's ridges. Against that image the psalm sets one short verdict, the Lord is righteous, and one act, he hath cut asunder the cords of the wicked, the plow's harness cut so the plowing stops. Gill and Delitzsch both take the cords as the yoke-ropes of the oxen doing the plowing, the oppressor's own tackle severed by the Lord's hand.

Psalms 129:5-8

The psalm turns to prayer against the enemies of Zion, and the imprecation is carried in a single figure rather than a curse of harm: let them be as the grass upon the housetops, which withereth before it groweth up, too shallow-rooted in the thin soil of a flat roof ever to be worth cutting. Because it never ripens, the mower and the binder of sheaves pass it by, and the greeting exchanged between reapers in the field, the blessing of the Lord be upon you, is never spoken over it. The gracious rule governs the reading: the wish is for the wicked's schemes to wither unfruitful, not a curse aimed at any living person, and the bench reads it as judgment on the persecution rather than on persons.