Psalms 129:3
The plowmen plowed over my back; they made their furrows long.
BSB
ASV
The plowers plowed upon my back; They made long their furrows.
KJV
The plowers plowed upon my back: they made long their furrows.
The plowers plowed up on my back. The scourgers tore the flesh as ploughmen furrow a field. The people were maltreated like a criminal given over to the lictors with their cruel whips; the back of the nation was scored and furrowed by oppression. It is a grand piece of imagery condensed into few words. A writer says the metaphor is muddled, but he is mistaken: there are several figures, like wheel within wheel, but there is no confusion.
Rare words are the text's own signal of a deliberate thread: the fewer the occurrences, the more the places it appears belong together.
The walk8
Follow this verse’s cross-references two steps out. Each card is a verse this one points to, and beneath it the verses that one points to in turn. Where several different paths arrive at the same place, that place is listed first: the text keeps returning to it. Every stop shows its own words, and every stop is a page.
Through
Isaiah 51:23I will place it in the hands of your tormentors, who told you: ‘Lie down, so we can walk over you,’ so that you made your back like the ground, like a street to…
leads to
When they had brought the kings to Joshua, he summoned all the men of Israel and said to the army commanders who had accompanied him, “Come here and put your feet on the necks…
“Behold, I will make Jerusalem a cup of drunkenness to all the surrounding peoples. Judah will be besieged, as well as Jerusalem.
But exclude the courtyard outside the temple. Do not measure it, because it has been given over to the nations, and they will trample the holy city for 42 months.
Indeed, this is what the LORD says: “Even the captives of the mighty will be taken away, and the plunder of the tyrant will be retrieved; I will contend with those who contend with…
Through
Psalms 141:7As when one plows and breaks up the soil, so our bones have been scattered at the mouth of Sheol.
leads to
There they are, overwhelmed with dread, where there was nothing to fear. For God has scattered the bones of those who besieged you. You put them to shame, for God has despised them.
As it is written: “For Your sake we face death all day long; we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered.”
Yet for Your sake we face death all day long; we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered.
Their bodies will lie in the street of the great city—figuratively called Sodom and Egypt—where their Lord was also crucified.