Isaiah5chapter 5

Isaiah 5:1-2

a song of my beloved touching his vineyard: The vineyard song opens as a love song sung for a friend, and the care it lists is total: fenced, cleared of stones, planted with the choicest vine, a tower for watching and a winepress already dug before the harvest is even a question. The Lord looked for grapes and the vineyard answered with wild grapes, a small sour fruit no vintner plants on purpose, and every act of care named in the verse makes that failure worse rather than explicable. Matthew Henry reads the whole opening as courtroom evidence entered before any verdict is asked for in verse three.

Isaiah 5:3-4

judge, I pray you, betwixt me and my vineyard: The song turns from narrative to trial, and Jerusalem and Judah are made the jury of their own case: judge, I pray you, betwixt me and my vineyard. The question repeats itself almost word for word from care given to fruit withheld, what could have been done more, and the repetition is the argument, nothing further was owed and nothing further could have been tried. The Lord's own vineyard parable at Matt 21:33 takes up this exact setup, a householder who plants, fences, builds a tower and a winepress, and the bench notes the borrowing as deliberate, the Lord teaching from a song his hearers already knew by heart.

Isaiah 5:5-7

I will take away the hedge thereof: The sentence follows the trial without a pause: the hedge removed, the wall broken, the ground left to briers and thorns, and the clouds themselves commanded to withhold rain, a judgment reaching past the vine to the very weather over it. Verse seven then does what no other verse in the song does, and gives its own interpretation without waiting on a reader: the vineyard of the Lord of hosts is the house of Israel, and the men of Judah his pleasant plant. The closing line turns on a pair of Hebrew words that nearly rhyme and do not nearly mean the same thing, looked for judgment but found oppression, for righteousness but found a cry, a wordplay Delitzsch and Barnes both set out in full.

Isaiah 5:8-10

join house to house: The first woe names a specific sin of the wealthy, buying up field after field and house after house until a family owns a district and lives on it alone, which the older commentators read against the land laws that kept ancestral plots inside a family. The Lord of hosts answers in the prophet's own hearing rather than through a vision, a form the bench notes as unusual weight: many houses shall be desolate, even great and fair, without inhabitant. Verse ten measures the judgment in the currency the sin was committed in, ten acres of vineyard yielding one bath and a homer of seed yielding only an ephah, roughly a tenth of what was sown, the land itself turning against the men who consolidated it.

Isaiah 5:11-14

rise up early in the morning: The second woe turns from land-grabbing to all-day drinking, men who rise early to chase strong drink and continue until wine inflames them at night, their feasts full of harp and viol and tabret but empty of any regard for the work of the Lord. The charge is not drink itself but the blindness it produces, they regard not, neither consider, a people entertained past the point of noticing their own coming exile. Hell enlarges herself and opens her mouth without measure to receive the very glory and pomp the feasts were meant to display, and Gill reads the image as Sheol's appetite matched exactly to the nation's excess.

Isaiah 5:15-17

the mean man shall be brought down: The leveling that closes this movement touches every rank at once, the mean man brought down and the mighty man humbled and the eyes of the lofty made low, before the single exception the chapter allows: the Lord of hosts shall be exalted in judgment, and God that is holy shall be sanctified in righteousness. Barnes reads verse sixteen as the whole chapter's hinge, every woe existing to clear the ground for that one exaltation, holiness answered by holiness rather than by a rival glory. The lambs feeding after their manner in the waste places of the fat ones pictures the land itself gone back to pasture once its wealthy tenants are removed, the reversal of the fenced vineyard that opened the chapter.

Isaiah 5:18-19

cords of vanity: The third woe pictures sin as a beast of burden being harnessed, drawing iniquity with cords of vanity and pulling sin along like a loaded cart, an image of habitual wrongdoing so practiced it no longer feels like effort. Verse nineteen quotes the mockers directly, let him make speed, and hasten his work, that we may see it, daring the prophet's warnings to arrive faster, and naming the title at the center of their taunt: the counsel of the Holy One of Israel. It is one of the twenty-five occurrences of that title across the book, the seraphim's Holy, holy, holy of chapter six standing behind every one of them, and here the mockers use it as a dare rather than a confession.

Isaiah 5:20-21

call evil good, and good evil: The fourth woe is a woe against inverted judgment itself, calling evil good and good evil, putting darkness for light and bitter for sweet, four reversed pairs the older writers read as the endpoint of the earlier sins rather than a fresh one, a conscience so used to justifying itself that it has stopped telling truth from its opposite. The fifth woe follows in one verse and diagnoses the cause: woe unto them that are wise in their own eyes, and prudent in their own sight, self-confidence functioning as the engine behind the confused categories just named. Clarke reads the pairing as cause following effect in reverse order, the moral confusion of verse twenty explained by the intellectual pride of verse twenty-one.

Isaiah 5:22-24

mighty to drink wine: The sixth woe returns to drink, but now paired with a courtroom sin rather than idle feasting, men mighty to drink wine who also justify the wicked for reward and take away the righteousness of the righteous from him, drunkenness and bribery named in one breath as companion vices. Verse twenty-four gathers all six woes into a single verdict with two similes for how completely the judgment consumes: as the fire devoureth the stubble, and the flame consumeth the chaff, so their root shall be as rottenness, nothing left to regrow from. The reason given closes the chapter's own summary of everything before it, they have cast away the law of the Lord of hosts, and despised the word of the Holy One of Israel.

Isaiah 5:25

his hand is stretched out still: One verse states the judgment already begun, the anger of the Lord kindled, his hand stretched forth, the hills trembling and the dead lying in the streets, and closes on a refrain the book repeats later across chapters nine and ten, for all this his anger is not turned away, but his hand is stretched out still. Barnes reads the refrain as a structural marker binding this chapter to the Assyrian sequence still ahead, one long sentence of judgment interrupted rather than finished. The repetition itself is the warning, each recurrence telling the reader that the hand has not yet been withdrawn.

Isaiah 5:26-30

lift up an ensign to the nations: The chapter's judgment closes by naming its own instrument without naming a nation: an ensign lifted to the nations from far, summoned with a hiss the way a shepherd calls flocks, an army that comes with speed swiftly and does not stumble or slumber or even loosen a shoe-latchet, discipline pictured as an unbroken column. The commentators read the description as fitting the Assyrian war machine specifically, arrows sharp, bows bent, horses' hoofs like flint and wheels like a whirlwind, though the name is withheld until later chapters make it explicit. The chapter that opened with a love song for a vineyard ends with darkness and sorrow over the land, judgment carried out by the very nations Israel was meant to outshine.