a plowman: the worker of the open field who breaks the soil and raises its grain, as distinct from the vinedresser who tends the vines
This is the man of the open field. The word came into Hebrew from Mesopotamia, where it named the plowman who worked a plot of ground behind a team of oxen, and Hebrew keeps that picture. When Jeremiah lists what Babylon smashed on its way through the world, this farmer is named together with his yoke of oxen, right beside the shepherd with his flock (Jeremiah 51:23).
Three times he stands next to the vinedresser (כָּרַם), and that pairing is the clearest guide to what the word means. Farming in Israel divided two ways: one man worked the open ground for wheat and barley, another tended the vines and their terraces. This word names the first. King Uzziah kept both on his lands because he loved the soil (2 Chronicles 26:10), Isaiah promises that outsiders will one day do both jobs for a restored people (Isaiah 61:5), and Joel summons both to wail when the crop is gone (Joel 1:11).
The word itself says nothing about who owns the ground. Some of these men work for a king or for a household that is not their own, and in the language it was borrowed from the term regularly named exactly that kind of dependent laborer. Others are simply the settled country people of Judah, living in the towns beside those who travel with the flocks (Jeremiah 31:24).
Because his whole year rides on rain falling at the right time, he turns up in the prophets mostly at moments of ruin, where he becomes the measure of how bad things have grown:
- The plowmen cover their heads in shame when the rain fails and the ground splits open (Jeremiah 14:4).
- They are told to stand ashamed over the lost wheat and barley when the harvest is destroyed (Joel 1:11).
- They are called in from their fields to join the trained mourners wailing in the streets (Amos 5:16).