Charles Ellicott Commentary Psalms 129:3

"The plowers plowed upon my back; They made long their furrows." — Psalms 129:3 (ASV)

Furrows.—The Hebrew word occurs only once elsewhere, in 1 Samuel 14:14, where the margin translates it here as furrow—a translation that is plainly not intelligible there. “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 that the ploughman handles at one time, and around which the plough consequently turns at the end of each furrow.

Delitzsch’s “furrow-strip,” therefore, more exactly reproduces the word, though here it is doubtless used with 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 on the people, is as striking as poetry ever produced. In fact, it combines two separate prophetic figures: Isaiah 1:6 and Isaiah 51:23.