Isaiah 5:1-7--The Vineyard of the LORD Destroyed

Isaiah 5:1-7
English Standard Version

The Vineyard of the LORD Destroyed
5 Let me sing for my beloved
    my love song concerning his vineyard:
My beloved had a vineyard
    on a very fertile hill.
2 He dug it and cleared it of stones,
    and planted it with choice vines;
he built a watchtower in the midst of it,
    and hewed out a wine vat in it;
and he looked for it to yield grapes,
    but it yielded wild grapes.

3 And now, O inhabitants of Jerusalem
    and men of Judah,
judge between me and my vineyard.
4 What more was there to do for my vineyard,
    that I have not done in it?
When I looked for it to yield grapes,
    why did it yield wild grapes?

5 And now I will tell you
    what I will do to my vineyard.
I will remove its hedge,
    and it shall be devoured;
I will break down its wall,
    and it shall be trampled down.
6 I will make it a waste;
    it shall not be pruned or hoed,
    and briers and thorns shall grow up;
I will also command the clouds
    that they rain no rain upon it.

7 For the vineyard of the LORD of hosts
    is the house of Israel,
and the men of Judah
    are his pleasant planting;
and he looked for justice,
    but behold, bloodshed;
for righteousness,
    but behold, an outcry!

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This section starts in a way that we might think we are reading from the Song of Songs again.  We start off with common images of "my beloved" and a "vineyard," but before we go too far down that rabbit hole, let's remember that God identifies His covenant with His people like that of a covenant for betrothal with the wedding coming, but at a point in the betrothal where the wedding is a certainty and it would require a divorce to break the betrothal).  Other times He uses husband and wife terminology as if they are already married.  Either way, the LORD should be the Beloved of His people, and they are His beloved.  Before He goes into talking about the impending judgment that is coming, he wants to remind them that He loves them and nothing about what He is going to say changes that love.  In fact, it is because He loves them that He must put them through this time of purification.

The vineyard also represents the people of God.  In that day and time, a vineyard was extremely valuable, and it would be protected by guard towers, walls, and all kinds of watchmen and workers.  The owner of the vineyard would do a lot of work to find somewhere fertile and make it suitable for growing and harvesting the grapes and turning them into wine, and he didn't want anyone to come in and steal or destroy what he had worked so hard for.  He also would carefully tend to his vines to make sure that they grew good grapes, and that the vineyard was free of disease, weeds, and predators that would destroy or damage the crop.

Despite the Vinedresser (the LORD) putting in all the hard work and providing all that should be necessary for a good harvest, he could not produce a harvest of good grapes (wild grapes are small and don't taste as good as the ones that should come from the work of the vinedresser).  His only conclusion that he can come to is that there must be something wrong with the soil (the heart of the people) and that it would not ever produce good fruit because the place that appeared to be fertile was unsuitable for his vineyard.  He would have to destroy everything and start all over again.  As for this vineyard, it is worthless, and he would no longer protect and defend it, and he would take away the hedge of protection from it, let the animals and scavengers come into it, and let it be destroyed and trampled down.  He will even let the thorns, thistles, briars, and other weeds grow up and overtake the land that he once cultivated and let the land lay fallow (a symbol of what would happen to the Land during the 70 years of Exile that the people were about to face.

We don't have to wonder about the interpretation because it is right here in the text.  The people of Israel and specifically the house of Judah (the king of Israel and his house) are the vineyard.  Where there should have been justice, there was the shedding of innocent blood.  He looked for righteousness, but instead there was the cries of the victims of all kinds of wickedness.  The LORD is the Vinedresser and owner of the vineyard and is going to have to take action to reset everything.  In many ways, Isreal is going to see their going away to Babylon much like their time that they spent as slaves in Egypt and the LORD bringing them back into the Land again like a fresh start of what things should have been like when He brought them into the Land the first time.  They would do many more things right the second time around, but they would be far from perfect keepers of His covenant (as we see when John the Baptist and Jesus come on the scene at the beginning of the New Testament, but the Jewish leaders though they are pretty great).  We'll see even further discussion of vines and fruit in the New Testament as Jesus talks about being the Vine and us being the branches and the Father being the Vinedresser and the Apostle Paul talking about the symbol of the Vine to say that God will prune cut off dead branches, but He is able to do something no human vinedresser can do, and that is that He can take a dead branch and make it living and fruitful once again.  He will do that with the nation of Israel, as He has taken the dead and unfruitful Gentiles and grafted them into the vine to make one new united people of Jews and Gentiles together.