- Isaiah 5 BSB ↗
A farmer chooses the best slope, clears the stones by hand, plants the finest cuttings, builds a watchtower and carves out a winepress, and waits years for the first harvest. When it comes, the grapes are sour and rotten. Anyone who has worked the land knows that grief. Isaiah begins this chapter as a singer at a festival, performing a song about just such a vineyard. The audience nods along, ready to condemn the ungrateful vines. Then he tells them who the vineyard is.
Where it sits in the story: The vineyard is one of the Bible's great pictures of God's people. Psalm 80 prays for the vine brought out of Egypt; Jesus tells a parable of tenants in a vineyard, clearly echoing this song, and calls himself the true vine (John 15). Here the image turns into a lawsuit: everything God did for Israel has produced injustice. The chapter prepares for Isaiah's call in chapter 6 and for the Assyrian storm that follows.
What this chapter is doing: To bring the people to condemn themselves through a song, then spell out exactly what the 'sour grapes' are — greed, self-indulgence, corrupted justice — and announce the foreign army that will come as judgement.
- 5:1–7 — The singer's friend lavishes care on a vineyard, but it yields wild grapes. Judge between me and my vineyard: what more could I have done? He will remove its hedge and let it become wasteland. The vineyard is Israel and Judah: God looked for justice and found bloodshed, for righteousness and heard a cry — a Hebrew wordplay.
- 5:8–17 — Woe to those who join house to house and field to field until no room is left for anyone else; their great houses will stand empty and their fields yield almost nothing. Woe to those who party from morning to night with wine and music but never notice what the LORD is doing. Exile and death are coming, and God will be shown holy by his justice.
- 5:18–23 — Woe to those who drag sin along like a cart and mock God to hurry up his plans; who call evil good and good evil; who are wise in their own eyes; who are champions at drinking but take bribes to acquit the guilty and deny justice to the innocent.
- 5:24–25 — Like fire eating straw, their root will rot and their flower blow away, because they rejected the LORD's teaching. The mountains shake; yet 'his hand is stretched out still' — a refrain that will return in chapters 9 and 10.
- 5:26–30 — God raises a signal and whistles for a nation from the ends of the earth. It comes swiftly and tirelessly, arrows sharp and horses' hooves like flint, roaring like a lion over its prey. Darkness covers the land.
Key verse: Isaiah 5:7 · So what: Isaiah's woes are strikingly modern: accumulating property until the poor are squeezed out, entertainment that dulls conscience, relabelling wrong as right, and justice for sale. The song asks every community that claims God's care: what fruit are we producing? It also shows a clever way to speak hard truth — let people judge the story before they see themselves in it.