A Song of Ascents in two halves that do not match. Verses 1 to 4 are a survivor's report, spoken by Israel in the first person singular: they harassed me, they plowed my back, and they did not win. Verses 5 to 8 turn to those who hate Zion and ask that they come to nothing, and the way the psalm does that is by describing a harvest that never happens. Watch the last verse. The greeting that reapers and passers by exchanged in a field is quoted in full, inside a sentence saying that nobody will say it, so the psalm ends on a blessing it has just withheld. Grammatically the first half drills the plural perfect, they did, and the second half the jussive, let them be.
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The line is given here and again in verse 2, with the instruction to repeat it placed between the two. The psalm builds its own call and response into itself instead of leaving it to the room.
The repetition arrives with a correction attached. Everything before the word yet is the enemy's version of the story, and the four words after it are the psalm's answer to it.
The image is farming and the enemy is the farmer. The back is a field, the furrows are the wounds, and the length of the furrow is offered as the measure of how long it went on.
4
יְהֹוָה צַדִּיק
קִצֵּץ עֲבוֹת רְשָׁעִים
יְהֹוָה
a-do-NAY
the LORD
צַדִּיק
tza-DIK
is righteous
The LORD is righteous;
קִצֵּץ
ki-TZETZ
He has cut
עֲבוֹת
a-VOT
the ropes of
רְשָׁעִים
re-sha-IM
the wicked
He has cut the ropes of the wicked.
The turn, and it is one word wide: righteous. No rescue is narrated, only the cutting of the ropes, which in the plowing picture of verse 3 are what tie the animal to the blade.
5
יֵבֹשׁוּ וְיִסֹּגוּ אָחוֹר
כֹּל שֹׂנְאֵי צִיּוֹן
יֵבֹשׁוּ
ye-vo-SHU
let them be ashamed
וְיִסֹּגוּ
ve-yi-so-GU
and let them fall back
אָחוֹר
a-CHOR
backward
Let them be shamed and driven back,
כֹּל
kol
all
שֹׂנְאֵי
son-EI
those who hate
צִיּוֹן
tzi-YON
Zion
all who hate Zion.
The second half opens. The verbs change to wishes and the enemy is named for the first time, no longer an unspecified they but people defined by what they hate.
Grass rooting in the dirt that gathers on a flat mud roof, with nothing underneath it to hold water. The last three words are hard and their exact sense is disputed.
7
שֶׁלֹּא מִלֵּא כַפּוֹ קוֹצֵר
וְחִצְנוֹ מְעַמֵּר
שֶׁלֹּא
she-LO
with which not
מִלֵּא
mi-LE
has filled
כַפּוֹ
cha-PO
his palm
קוֹצֵר
ko-TZER
a reaper
with which no reaper fills his hand,
וְחִצְנוֹ
ve-chitz-NO
nor his lap
מְעַמֵּר
me-a-MER
one binding sheaves
nor a binder of sheaves his lap.
The failed harvest is measured by two empty containers, the reaper's fist and the fold of the binder's garment. Nothing is destroyed here; there is simply nothing to pick up.
The greeting that belongs to a field at harvest time is quoted whole and then denied. The psalm closes on the name of the LORD twice over, inside a sentence about words nobody says.
♦ PARDES analysis: פרדס
The four levels of Jewish reading of the sacred text: פשט Peshat (literal meaning), רמז Remez (symbolic allusion), דרש Drash (midrashic interpretation), סוד Sod (mystical meaning). The word פרדס means "orchard", each level is a fruit.
פשט · Peshat: literal meaning
Two halves, joined at verse 4. The first half is testimony: a long persecution stated twice, an image of it as plowing, and then one flat sentence about God that ends it. The second half is a request, and it is made entirely out of farming that fails. Grass on a roof cannot root, so it dies standing; there is nothing for a reaper to grip; and because there is no harvest, the greeting people call across a field never gets called. The chain is tight. Verse 4 cuts the ropes of the plow, verses 6 to 8 remove the crop, so the enemy loses first the tool and then the yield. Note that צְרָרוּנִי (tze-ra-ru-ni, v.1) and the same word in verse 2 mean harassed or hemmed in rather than defeated: the psalm never claims the persecution failed to hurt.
רמז · Remez: allusion
רַבַּת (ra-bat, v.1) is a feminine form used adverbially, much or greatly, and it is the first word of the quotation both times. The verb after it is from the root tzade resh resh, whose other outputs are narrowness and distress, so being harassed and being squeezed into a tight place are one word in Hebrew. לְמַעֲנִיתָם (le-ma-a-ni-tam, v.3) is a rare noun for the strip a plow cuts in one pass, which is why the boast about length works. שֶׁקַּדְמַת (she-kad-mat, v.6) and שָׁלַף (sha-laf, v.6) are the hard place: the first is a construct form meaning before or prior to, the second a perfect verb usually taken as drawn out or plucked, and the resulting clause has been read as withers before it is pulled and as withers before it shoots up. Both are current and the difference matters, because one has the grass die after it grows and the other has it die first. וְחִצְנוֹ (ve-chitz-no, v.7) is the fold of a garment used as a carrying pouch.
דרש · Drash: midrashic reading
From my youth has been read as national rather than personal: not one man's childhood but Israel's, which puts Egypt at the start of the list. The instruction in יֹאמַר (yo-mar, v.1) נָא (na, v.1) יִשְׂרָאֵל (yis-ra-el, v.1), let Israel now say, uses the same three words that open the responses in Psalm 118, so the line is built for a crowd to repeat and the psalm expects to be said aloud by more than one person. The greeting of verse 8 is not invented for the curse; the book of Ruth records exactly that exchange between a landowner and his reapers in a barley field, which is how we know it was ordinary speech. Withholding it is therefore not a curse in words but the removal of an occasion for words, and that is the psalm's harshest move: the wicked are not cursed, they are left out of a conversation.
סוד · Sod: mystical reading
Read for depth rather than for events, the psalm is about rooting. The speaker has been cut at from youth and is still standing, which means the roots go under the damage; the enemy is asked to become the opposite, growth with no soil under it, tall for a morning and dry by noon. The ropes of עֲבוֹת (a-vot, v.4) are read as the bindings that hold a person to a work not their own, and the one act attributed to God in the whole psalm is cutting them, not lifting the plowman off the field. Verse 8 then closes the circle: a blessing said in the name has to pass through someone, and where there is no harvest there is no one to pass it through. The last two words of the psalm are the name, and they are on the wrong side of a negative, which is a way of ending on it without granting it.
Hebrew text: Miqra according to the Masorah (MAM), after the Aleppo Codex, via Sefaria, CC BY-SA. English: The Holy Scriptures, a New Translation (JPS 1917), via Sefaria, public domain. Transliteration generated by this site's own engine (assets/translit.js).