Psalm 129

The opening is a call and response: many a time they have attacked me from my youth — let Israel now say it. The nation's youth means Egypt, and the list runs on from there through every occupier since.

The image for that suffering is plowing. An ancient plow was a wooden beam with an iron point, dragged by oxen, cutting long parallel furrows through the dirt. Saying that plowmen plowed across my back and made their furrows long is a picture of a scourged man, and of a nation used as farmland by whoever owned it that century.

The turn comes with grass on a rooftop. Roofs were beams covered with brush and a thick layer of packed earth, rolled flat with a stone cylinder. After the rains that earth sprouted a green fuzz — but there was no depth, so it withered in days, and no reaper ever filled a hand with it.

The final touch is a withheld greeting. Passers-by called out a blessing to reapers in a field as a matter of ordinary courtesy — the greeting Boaz exchanged with his workers. The psalm says nobody will say it over this crop, which was the plainest way in that culture to declare a thing worthless.