Mowing

Mowing appears in the Hebrew scriptures as a figure for both blessing and frailty: the rain that revives mown grass, the brevity of human life cut down at evening, and the king's claim on the first growth of a field.

The Rain on Mown Grass

The royal psalm pictures the just king's reign descending on his people in language drawn from the mower's field: "He will come down like rain on the mown grass, As showers that water the earth" (Ps 72:6). The image presupposes a regular agricultural rhythm — grass cut, then renewed by the rains.

Grass Cut Down at Evening

The same scene of cut grass turns elegiac in the psalm of Moses. Human life flourishes briefly and is mown down: "In the morning it flourishes, and grows up; In the evening it is cut down, and withers" (Ps 90:6). Mowing here figures the brevity that overtakes every generation.

The Reaper's Empty Hand

A related agricultural picture closes the song against Zion's enemies. The grass on the housetops, withered before it can be cut, leaves nothing for the harvester: "With which the reaper does not fill his hand, Nor he who binds sheaves his bosom" (Ps 129:7). The mowing-and-binding sequence is the normal expectation; here it is denied.

The King's Mowings

Amos's first vision turns on a royal claim to the first cutting. After the king has taken his mowings from the field, locusts devour the second growth — the share that should have fed the people: "Thus the Sovereign Yahweh showed me: and, look, he formed locusts in the beginning of the shooting up of the latter growth; and, look, it was the latter growth after the king's mowings" (Amos 7:1).