What Does Psalm 129:3 Mean in the King James?
The plowers plowed upon my back: they made long their furrows.
The analysis reads the King James wording.
King James Version The King James Version, first published in 1611. Selah Verse shows the standard text.
THE KEY
The Hebrew root behind “plowed” can also mean “devise,” so the furrows hold violence deliberately worked into a body.
THE MEANING
The verse speaks from inside a body treated like soil: harm is repeated until it leaves long, visible lines. It gives bodily suffering direct language without disguising it as something abstract.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the lie that repeated harm is only an idea: the verse locates oppression on the body and names its marks.
THE ROOT
חָרְשׁוּ
ḥārəšū
GROWS FROM
חָרַשׁ
To plow; in related usage, to devise or plot.
“plowed” in this verse is ḥārəšū. The same Hebrew root can describe plowing soil and devising harm. The verse’s furrows are not just an image of pain: the language links a deliberate plot with the marks worked into a body.
ALSO GROWS
plow: To plow or turn soil in furrows.
חָרַשׁ
Here the back is figured as worked ground, and the plowing leaves long, repeated marks.
devise: To devise or plot, especially harm.
חָרַשׁ
Proverbs uses this root in “Devise not evil,” showing that the violence described here can be conceived before it is carried out.
THE PATTERN
Violence cuts its marks into bodies and communities, and scripture names those marks without abstraction.
I gave my back to the smiters, and my cheeks to them that plucked off the hair: I hid not my face from shame and spitting.Therefore shall Zion for your sake be plowed as a field, and Jerusalem shall become heaps, and the mountain of the house as the high places of the forest.Who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree, that we, being dead to sins, should live unto righteousness: by whose stripes ye were healed.THE THREAD
Devise not evil against thy neighbour, seeing he dwelleth securely by thee.Proverbs 3:29 uses חָרַשׁ (ḥāraš, “to plow; devise”) in the command “Devise not evil.” The shared root connects the furrowed back to harm conceived against a neighbor: one word holds the plot and its bodily result together.
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