Isaiah 5 · a question people ask
What were the "wild grapes"?
Wild grapes is be'ushim, a word the Hebrew Bible has only in 5:2 and 5:4 (tap wild grapes). Brown-Driver-Briggs gives it as "stinking or worthless things, wild grapes". The song doesn't say what the wild grapes are. When it names the vineyard, it says what the LORD looked for and what was there instead, with the verb of 5:2 and 5:4: he "looked for justice, but behold, oppression, for righteousness, but behold, a cry of distress" (5:7). It doesn't say more than that. The chapter goes straight on to six woes (5:8-22), which include those "who acquit the guilty for a bribe, but deny justice for the innocent!" (5:23), and the chapter on Proverbs 17 sets that verse beside the proverbs on bribes (Proverbs 17:15, 17:23).
The verses
“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. He looked for it to yield grapes, but it yielded wild grapes.”
“What could have been done more to my vineyard, that I have not done in it? Why, when I looked for it to yield grapes, did it yield wild grapes?”
“For the vineyard of the LORD 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.”
“He who justifies the wicked, and he who condemns the righteous, both of them alike are an abomination to the LORD.”