Psalms Chapter 129 verse 3 Holy Bible
The plowers plowed upon my back; They made long their furrows.
read chapter 129 in ASV
The ploughmen were ploughing on my back; long were the wounds they made.
read chapter 129 in BBE
The ploughers ploughed upon my back; they made long their furrows.
read chapter 129 in DARBY
The plowers plowed upon my back: they made long their furrows.
read chapter 129 in KJV
read chapter 129 in WBT
The plowers plowed on my back. They made their furrows long.
read chapter 129 in WEB
Over my back have ploughers ploughed, They have made long their furrows.
read chapter 129 in YLT
Pulpit Commentary
Pulpit CommentaryVerse 3. - The plowers plowed upon my back. A strong metaphor, which does not elsewhere occur. The idea is perhaps taken from the cruel treatment of captives in those days, who, in certain cases, were "put under saws and harrows of iron" (2 Samuel 12:31), or, as it is elsewhere expressed, "threshed with threshing instruments of iron" (Amos 1:3). They made long their furrows; i.e. "lengthened out their tortures."
Ellicott's Commentary
Ellicott's Commentary for English Readers(3) Furrows.--The Hebrew word only occurs once besides, in 1Samuel 14:14, where the margin renders as here, furrow--a rendering which plainly there is not intelligible. "Half a furrow of an acre of land," as a space in which twenty men were killed, gives no clear idea to the mind. But Dr. J. G. Wettstein, in his excursus at the end of Delitzsch's Commentary, explains the ma'an to be the strip of ground which the ploughman takes in hand at one time, and round which consequently at the end of each furrow the plough turns. Delitzsch's "furrow-strip," therefore, more exactly reproduces the word, though here doubtless it is used with a poetic freedom and may be translated furrow. The double image, suggesting the lash given to a slave, and at the same time the actual and terrible imprints of oppression left on the country as well as the race, is as striking as poetry ever produced. It, in fact, combines two separate prophetic figures, Isaiah 1:6; Isaiah 51:23.
