Psalm 129 is noteworthy for a very striking and vivid image of oppression. The image comes at the end of the opening lament:
“Greatly have they afflicted me from my youth” —
let Israel now say —
“Greatly have they afflicted me from my youth,
yet they have not prevailed against me.
The plowers plowed upon my back;
they made long their furrows.”
The embodied nature of the agricultural metaphor—plowers digging out long furrows upon a person's back—makes me wince. Most scholarship views the image as describing forced labor. Verse 4 describes God cutting “the cords of the wicked,” an image of being freed from the yoke. But other scholars don't see the image as being that of yoked oxen but rather of a violated, torn-up field. If the speaker of the psalm is corporate Israel, then the metaphor speaks to violence done upon the land by oppressive invaders and overlords. The back of Israel has been torn up like a plowed field. Still other scholars see the metaphor as a reference to violence inflicted upon the body, the furrows are images of physical beatings and scourging. Some see references to sexual violence in the image of “plowing” (see, for example, Judges 14.18).
All told, then, the image is one of the most embodied metaphors describing the experience of oppression. Images of forced labor, military conquest, scourging, and sexual violence are all invoked.
Consequently, given the violence imagined, it's not surprising that Psalm 129 turns to imprecation:
May all who hate Zion
be put to shame and turned backward!
Let them be like the grass on the housetops,
which withers before it grows up,
with which the reaper does not fill his hand
nor the binder of sheaves his arms,
nor do those who pass by say,
“The blessing of the Lord be upon you!
We bless you in the name of the Lord!”
I've made this comment before in this series, but it bears repeating. Many liberal and progressive readers of Scripture get anxious about the imprecatory Psalms. But I find this timidity hypocritical. Progressives love to see themselves as sticking up for victims. And yet, when these victims speak in Scripture, victims of physical beatings and sexual assault, the progressives rush to silence them. Psalm 129 is an excellent example of this and makes the point even clearer. Progressives routinely cite research on how trauma affects and changes the body. The body keeps the score, right? (I’m not interested here about the contested science surrounding that claim, just making an observation about trauma discourse.) Here in Psalm 129 we find a metaphor pointing toward the embodied memory of the victims, the damage and violation etched onto the body itself. And in response to that you want to silence the voices of those bodies? I thought we were supposed to listen to the traumatized body. And yet, that's precisely what progressive readers of Scripture do when they approach the imprecatory psalms. They silence the bodies of traumatized victims.
