Biblion Bible Commentary
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The Song of the Vineyard
Isaiah 5:1-7
1 Let me sing for my well beloved a song of my beloved about his vineyard. My beloved had a vineyard on a very fruitful hill. · WEB
A love song about a farm turns into a verdict, and the audience convicts itself before it knows what it is judging.
Let me sing for my well beloved a song of my beloved about his vineyard Isaiah 5:1.
Seven verses, and they are a trap. The prophet opens by announcing a love song about a friend's farm — the kind of thing sung at a vintage festival, when everyone was in a good mood and had been drinking.
My beloved had a vineyard on a very fruitful hill. He dug it up, gathered out its stones, planted it with the choicest vine, built a tower in the middle of it, and also cut out a wine press in it Isaiah 5:1–2.
Five operations, and every one is expensive. Clearing stones from a hillside is the hardest labor in agriculture; the choicest vine is a named premium stock; a tower means the crop was worth guarding, and a rock-cut press means the owner expected to be doing this for generations. Nothing was withheld.
He looked for it to yield grapes, but it yielded wild grapes.
The word suggests something stinking or worthless. Not a failed crop but a bad one — the plant grew, produced, and what it produced was inedible.
Now, inhabitants of Jerusalem and men of Judah, please judge between me and my vineyard. What could have been done more to my vineyard, that I have not done in it? Isaiah 5:3–4.
The song stops and the singer asks the crowd for a ruling. It is Nathan's method with David 2 Samuel 12:5: get the verdict before the defendant knows he is on trial. Any farmer in the audience would answer the question the same way, and the answer is that nothing more could have been done.
I will take away its hedge, and it will be eaten up. I will break down its wall... I will lay it a wasteland. It won't be pruned or hoed Isaiah 5:5–6.
The sentence is not destruction but abandonment. The protections are withdrawn and the care stops, and the vineyard is left to become what an unattended vineyard becomes.
Then one clause no farmer could say. I will also command the clouds that they rain no rain on it. The mask drops in five words, and the audience knows who has been singing.
For the vineyard of Yahweh of Armies is the house of Israel, and the men of Judah his pleasant plant. He looked for justice, but behold, oppression, for righteousness, but behold, a cry of distress Isaiah 5:7.
The last line is a pair of puns that cannot survive translation — in Hebrew each expected word and the word that arrived instead differ by a syllable. The sound of the verse is of something coming out almost right and being entirely wrong, which is the song's whole point about the grapes.
Jesus tells this parable again, with the same vineyard and the same owner, and adds the tenants and the son Matthew 21:33–41 — and gets his verdict from the audience the same way.
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