Isaiah5chapter 5

Every step of the vineyard song is real work. A Judean hillside had to be cleared of stones, and the stones went into terrace walls that held the soil. A hedge of thorn or a low stone wall kept out foxes and wild pigs. A tower of piled stone gave the watchman a view and a place to sleep at harvest. And the press was cut straight down into the bedrock: a shallow treading floor with a channel running to a lower catch basin. Hundreds of these rock-cut presses are still visible in the Judean hills. Anyone listening had worked in one.

The first woe names the crime the whole book keeps circling. Joining house to house and field to field means buying up the neighbors — usually through debt — until one family owns the valley. Israel's law tied every family to an inherited plot that was not supposed to be sold off permanently, so consolidating land was not shrewd business; it was the dismantling of the nation's design.

The judgment is delivered in dry measurements, which is how a farmer feels a disaster. Ten acres of vineyard will make one bath of wine — about six gallons, a laughable yield. A homer of seed will return an ephah, one tenth of what was sown. You would eat less than you planted.

The chapter closes with the sound of the Assyrian army before anyone in Judah had met it: arrows sharpened, bows strung, horse hooves like flint, chariot wheels like a whirlwind, and not one man in the ranks stumbling or loosening his belt. Assyrian reliefs show exactly that army. God says he will whistle for them the way a beekeeper whistles up a swarm.