Isaiah — Chapter 5

I will sing to my beloved the canticle of his cousin concerning his vineyard. The 'dilectus' (beloved) = Christ (from Hebrew 'dod'); 'patruelis' (kinsman/cousin) = Christ as kinsman of Isaiah by race from Judah. Lapide gives five meanings of Hebrew 'dod': kinsman, beloved, lover, love/charity, breasts. The vineyard = Israel planted on Judah: 'cornu filio olei' = a high, fertile spot (cornu = elevated, mountainous location; filius olei = rich, anointed land). Note: Christ would use this same parable (Matt.21) to describe the same thing, as Isaiah foretold at v.1.

And he fenced it in, and picked the stones out of it, and planted it with the choicest vines, and built a tower in the midst thereof. The hedge/fence = the Law, God's providential protection, and the custody of Angels (Ambrose, Origen); the tower = the Temple, Scripture, or spiritual guides; the winepress/torcular = the altar (mystically = the Cross of Christ, from which the wine of joy is pressed by the sufferings of martyrs); the stones removed = idols; the choicest vine = 'sorec,' the best variety. Despite everything, the vineyard produced labruscas = sour, fetid wild grapes (sin, obstinacy, the cry of 'Crucifige!').

And now, O ye inhabitants of Jerusalem and ye men of Judah, judge between me and my vineyard. God invites the people to judge between Himself and Israel in this clear and manifest case — so that they condemn themselves by their own sentence, as Lapide notes the method of the Fathers.

What is there that I ought to do more to my vineyard, that I have not done to it? This is a grave exprobration by God: He has fulfilled every obligation of a vine-dresser, yet the vineyard refused to produce good fruit. Tropologically: the sinner can never say to God, 'What more did You owe me that You did not give?' — only the Christian can humbly confess his own insufficiency before God's generosity.

Now therefore I will show you what I will do to my vineyard: I will take away the hedge thereof. God will remove from Israel the protection of the Law, His own providence, and the custody of angels — transferred to the Gentiles. Josephus (BJ 7.12) records the fulfillment: the heavy Temple gate opened of its own accord, and voices (of angels) were heard: 'Let us depart from here.' The command to the clouds not to rain = Apostles commanded not to preach the Gospel to Jews but to turn to the Gentiles (Acts 18:6).

And I will make it desolate: it shall not be pruned, and it shall not be digged, but briers and thorns shall come up. God abandons the vineyard to wild growth: no more pruning (correction) or digging (cultivation of hearts through the word). Spiritually: He withdraws His inspiration, preaching, and sacramental grace from those who obstinately refuse them. Gregory: 'He who turns from God and prospers is closest to ruin, inasmuch as he is furthest from the discipline of chastisement.' Clouds = Apostles commanded not to rain the Gospel upon them.

For the vineyard of the Lord of hosts is the house of Israel, and the man of Judah his pleasant plant. Isaiah identifies the parable: Israel = the vineyard; Judah = the pleasant shoot (germen delectabile = the messianic tribe). The famous Hebrew paronomasia: God expected 'mishpat' (justice) and found 'mishpach' (iniquity); 'tsedaka' (righteousness) and heard 'tseaka' (a cry of distress/the cry 'Crucifige!').

Woe to you that join house to house and lay field to field. First sin: avarice — the insatiable accumulation of land and property. Lapide cites Nero's consuming all of Rome for his palace; Ambrose's De Nabuthe: 'nature knows no rich man; earth was given in common; why do you alone claim it as property?' Long florilegia from Chrysostom, Bernard, Nazianzus, Basil against avarice. The rich man's thesaurus is the burial-mound of the poor's lives.

In my ears, saith the Lord of hosts: of a truth many great and fair houses shall be desolate without an inhabitant. Hebrew 'Im lo' is a formula of execratory oath (suppressing the divine curse out of reverence): 'I swear that your great houses shall become deserts.' Fulfilled in the Roman devastation.

For ten acres of vineyards shall yield one little measure, and thirty bushels of seed shall yield three bushels. Sterility as the just punishment of avarice: ten acres produce only one laguncula (a small vessel) of wine; thirty modii of seed yield only three modii of harvest — a tenfold deficit. The punishment fits the crime: those who coveted limitless excess receive a proportionately extreme scarcity.

Woe to you that rise up early in the morning to follow drunkenness. Second sin: morning drunkenness — drinking from sunrise to sunset. Basil: wine is 'a voluntary demon clothed in pleasure, mother of malice, enemy of virtue.' Alexander the Great ruined all his virtues by wine-drinking, citing Androcides's letter. Eubulus's verses on the three cups of wine (the fourth is insolence, the seventh is blows, the tenth is madness) quoted from Athenaeus.

The harp and the lyre and the timbrel and the flute and wine are in their feasts: and the work of the Lord they regard not. Three works of God they neglect: (1) the work of creation, which should lead all to contemplate and praise the Creator (Man alone has an upright face to behold the heavens — to debase it in gluttony is to live as a beast); (2) the work of redemption by Christ; (3) the imminent work of God's punitive vengeance.

Therefore is my people led away captive, because they had not knowledge. 'Quia non habuit scientiam' — because they reduced themselves to belly-servants who did not know or acknowledge God their sustainer. In the Roman siege, nobles perished by starvation (Josephus: mothers cooked and ate their children). Lapide notes the prophetic use of preterite for future.

Therefore hath hell enlarged her soul, and opened her mouth without any bounds. Sheol/hell yawns wide to receive the countless slaughtered. Lapide gives three readings: (1) prosopopoeia: hell as a gluttonous beast opening its maw; (2) Sanchez: the powerful devourers of the poor are themselves like hell, and a hell equally voracious will devour them; (3) the common burial ground of the Gehinnom in the Valley of Cedron.

And man shall be brought down, and man shall be humbled. Both the common man (homo) and the nobleman (vir) will be humbled without discrimination. Then God alone will be exalted and 'sanctified' = declared holy in this act of just vengeance; His justice is His sanctity.

And the lambs shall feed according to their order, and strangers shall eat the deserted places of the rich. Three interpretations: (1) literally, after the destruction the poor left by Nabuzardan will graze in the deserted fields; (2) Sanchez: the powerful who fattened themselves on the poor will themselves be slaughtered like fat cattle; (3) Lapide's preferred reading: the 'lambs' = Gentile Christians (newly born, like new-born lambs), who inherit the spiritual pastures of Sion abandoned by the unbelieving Jews.

Woe to you that draw iniquity with cords of vanity, and sin as the rope of a cart. Third sin: obstinate persistence in sin, so long-practiced that the habits have grown from threads to cable-thick ropes. Sin is called 'vanity' because it is void in itself (like a spider's web) yet imprisons. Augustine on his own chains of concubinage (Confessions 8.5) quoted at length: 'I was held, not by iron chains but by my own iron will.' Samson/Delilah allegory: concupiscence cuts off the hair of strength and delivers the man to the Philistines. 'Principiis obsta' (Ovid) — resist at the beginning.

Who say: Let him make haste, and let his work come quickly, that we may see it. Impious scoffers who deny God's providence — Epicurean atheists who think the delay of threatened punishment means there will be none. Peter 2 Ep.3:4 cited: 'since the creation all things continue as they are.' Lapide: the delay is God's mercy, not impotence; Titus's arrival will demonstrate that divine threats are no 'bluff.'

Woe to you that call evil good, and good evil: that put darkness for light, and light for darkness. Fourth sin: moral inversion — calling sin virtue and vice prudence. Learned from the devil (Gregory: the enemy disguises faults as virtues — cruelty as justice, immoderate anger as righteous zeal, prodigality as generosity). Maximus: flatterers who call the jester 'gracious,' the foul-tongued 'civil,' the irascible 'vigorous.'

Woe to you that are wise in your own eyes and prudent in your own conceits. Fifth sin: self-conceit — trusting in human political wisdom rather than in God's law and the counsel of prophets. The Scribes and Pharisees rejected Christ's wisdom for their own tradition.

Woe to you that are mighty to drink wine and stout men at drunkenness. Returning to the second sin with additional detail: they are powerful only at wine-drinking (not in battle or governance); 'miscere siceram' = mixing strong drinks together to maximize intoxication.

Who justify the wicked for gifts, and take away the justice of the just from him. Corrupt judges justifying the impious for bribes — an act of double injustice: simultaneously wronging the innocent and emboldening the guilty.

Therefore as the tongue of fire devoureth the stubble, and the heat of the flame consumeth it; so shall their root be as a coal, and their bud shall go up as dust. The threatened punishment arrives: the Romans will burn the 'wild vineyard' like dry stubble so completely that today the old Jerusalem is nothing but ruins (Lapide writes from personal observation). 'Abjecerunt enim legem Domini' — because they cast off God's law and blasphemed the Holy One of Israel (= Christ crucified).

Therefore is the wrath of the Lord kindled against his people, and he hath stretched out his hand against them, and struck them. Repeated strikes of God's punishing hand upon Israel — the refrain 'yet his hand is stretched out still' signals ongoing punishment extending to Lapide's own day (Jews still in exile). 'Facta sunt morticina eorum quasi stercus' = their corpses rotted like dung — applied also morally to outwardly beautiful bodies that are inwardly sacks of corruption.

And he will lift up a sign to the nations far off, and will hiss to them from the ends of the earth. God 'whistles' (sibilabit) to summon the Roman armies from afar — as a beekeeper calls his bees with a whistle, a captain calls his sailors, or a shepherd his flock. The Romans gathered from Gaul, Spain, and all nations by God's providential summoning.

There is none that shall faint, nor labour among them: they shall not slumber nor sleep. Vivid military hypotyposis of the Roman army: tireless, alert, well-equipped, swift. No one stumbles, no sandal-strap breaks, no waist-belt slackens.

Their arrows are sharp, and all their bows are bent. The hoofs of their horses are like the flint, and their wheels like the violence of a tempest. The flint-hard hooves are appropriate for rocky Judaea, which is not good cavalry country — Lapide notes this detail from Josephus. The whirling chariots like a storm-tempest depict the terrifying speed of the Roman advance.

His roaring shall be like that of a lion, and he shall roar like a young lion: he shall make a noise, and shall lay hold of the prey, and shall embrace it, and there shall be none to deliver it. The Roman army is compared to a roaring young lion that seizes its prey: 'none shall deliver it.' The fulfillment: Titus seized Jerusalem completely.

And he shall make a noise over it in that day like the noise of the sea: we shall look towards the land, and behold darkness of tribulation, and the light is darkened in the smoke thereof. The din of the siege like the roaring sea; hyperbolic darkness of tribulation so great that even the light seems obscured. This is the symbolic darkness of utter calamity.