Isaiah55chapter 55

The chapter opens with a street cry. In an eastern market the water-seller and the wine-seller worked the crowd by shouting — ho, everyone who thirsts — and the shout was always followed by a price. This one names the goods, water, wine, and milk, and then breaks the pattern: come, buy without money and without price. A vendor who says that is not selling.

The complaint that follows is an economic one anybody could feel. Why do you spend money for what is not bread, and your wages for what does not satisfy? Wages in that world were often paid daily, and a man who came home with nothing to eat had wasted the day itself.

The offer is then given a legal shape: I will make an everlasting covenant with you, the sure mercies of David. That refers to the grant God made to David's house, a covenant of the kind a great king made to a favored servant, where the obligation rests on the giver. Here it is extended to the whole crowd in the street.

The rain picture is the Levantine farming year in one sentence. Rain and snow come down and do not return, but water the earth and make it bring forth and bud, so that it gives seed to the sower and bread to the eater. In that land the rains came in two seasons, and everything depended on them; a farmer kept back seed grain from his own harvest to plant the next year, so seed for the sower and bread for the eater are two different piles from the same crop.

The closing image is a replanted landscape: instead of the thorn shall come up the cypress, and instead of the brier the myrtle. Thorn and brier are what grows on abandoned land; cypress and myrtle are what someone plants on purpose.