Isaiah 5 Bible study: The song of the vineyard

The chapter opens as a song: "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" (5:1) (tap well beloved, vineyard). The singer tells what his beloved did for it, and then, "He looked for it to yield grapes, but it yielded wild grapes" (5:2) (tap looked for, wild grapes). Then the owner speaks for himself, and asks his hearers to decide: "Now, inhabitants of Jerusalem and men of Judah, please judge between me and my vineyard" (5:3). "What could have been done more to my vineyard, that I have not done in it?" (5:4). He says what he will do to it, down to "I will also command the clouds that they rain no rain on it" (5:6). Here is what almost everyone misses: only after all this does the song say whose vineyard it is, and what it is. "For the vineyard of the LORD of Armies is the house of Israel, and the men of Judah his pleasant plant" (5:7). In Hebrew men of Judah is the same two words in 5:3 and 5:7. The men asked to judge between the owner and his vineyard are told that they are its plant.

Isaiah 5:2→leads toMark 12:1

Isaiah's song tells what the owner did for his vineyard: "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 5:2), and it had a hedge, for he says, "I will take away its hedge" (Isaiah 5:5). Jesus began a parable, "A man planted a vineyard, put a hedge around it, dug a pit for the wine press, built a tower, rented it out to a farmer, and went into another country" (Mark 12:1). The planting, the hedge, the wine press and the tower are in both. Jesus doesn't name Isaiah, and Mark doesn't say the words come from Isaiah 5, so setting the two side by side is a reading. Some hear Isaiah's song in the parable's first words: in both, an owner has done all this for his vineyard (Isaiah 5:4). Others read the parable on its own, its first words simply telling how a vineyard was made ready, and draw nothing from Isaiah. From there the two go different ways: in Isaiah the vineyard itself "yielded wild grapes" (Isaiah 5:2), and in the parable the owner rents it out "to a farmer" (Mark 12:1). These notes pick neither reading, and make neither the vineyard nor the farmer anyone today.

כֶּרֶםkeremsay KEH-rem

Brown-Driver-Briggs: "vineyard". Strong's: "a garden or vineyard". "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" (5:1). The chapter has kerem seven times (5:1 twice, 5:3, 5:4, 5:5, 5:7, 5:10) of Isaiah's fourteen, and the WEB gives each as vineyard. The song keeps to the vineyard until 5:7 says what it is: "For the vineyard of the LORD of Armies is the house of Israel" (5:7). The first woe has it once more: "For ten acres of vineyard shall yield one bath" (5:10). Isaiah has it before this chapter too: "It is you who have eaten up the vineyard" (Isaiah 3:14), where eaten up is the verb of 5:5's "it will be eaten up" (5:5). And it comes again in another song: "A pleasant vineyard!" (Isaiah 27:2).