Isaiah 5:1

Now will I sing to my well beloved,.... These are the words of the Prophet Isaiah, being about to represent the state and condition of the people of Israel by way of parable, which he calls a song,

Now will I sing to my wellbeloved a song of my beloved touching his vineyard. My wellbeloved hath a vineyard in a very fruitful hill: IISA. 5:1-30. A new prophecy, entire in itself.

ISAIAH CHAPTER 5 Israel God’ s vineyard; his mercies, and their unfruitfulness; should be laid waste, . Judgments upon covetousness, ; upon drunkards, and the lascivious, ,12. The great misery of the Jews, . Judgments on impiety, scoffers at God’ s threatenings, those who corrupt the notions of good and ill, strong drinkers, and unjust judges, . God’ s anger and the Chaldeans’ army against them, . Now will I sing; I will record it, to be a witness for God, and against you, as Moses did his song, 32:1. To my Well-beloved; to the Lord of the vineyard, as appears by the last clause of the verse; to God or Christ, whom I love and serve, and for whose glory, eclipsed by you, I am greatly concerned. A song of my Beloved; not devised by me, not the effect of my envy or passion; but inspired by God, which therefore it behoveth you to lay to heart. His vineyard; his church, oft and very fitly called a vineyard, because of God’ s singular respect to it, and care of it, and his delight in it, and expectation of good fruit from it, &c. In a very fruitful hill; hills being places most commodious for vines: see . Heb. in a horn (which may signify either, 1. The figure or shape of the land of Canaan, which resembles a horn; or, 2. The height and hilliness of that land, as horns are the highest parts of beasts; or, 3. The goodliness and excellency of it, as a horn, when it is ascribed to a man, signifies his glory and dignity, as ,5 Psalms 89:17,24, &c.) the son of oil, which, by a vulgar Hebraism, notes an oily or a fat soil.

Isaiah 5:1 Now will I sing to my wellbeloved a song of my beloved touching his vineyard. My wellbeloved hath a vineyard in a very fruitful hill:Ver. 1. Now will I sing.] Now, or, Now I pray, as stirring up his hearers to attention; for here beginneth his third sermon. He had endeavoured, but with little good effect, to convince them of their detestable unthankfulness, apostasy, and other enormities, in prose. Now he resolves to try another course, and to be unto them as a poet rather than a prophet, if haply they might be taken by the sweetness of his verse, and loveliness of his voice. “ Metra parant animos, comprendunt plurima paucis: Aures delectant, pristina commemorant. ” True it is that poets, for the most part, are dulcissime vani, most sweetly vain, as Augustine said of Homer. And some have noted well concerning St Paul, that citing his countryman, Aratus (for he was a Cilician), he nameth him not, but only saith, "Certain of your own poets," notwithstanding the piety of his beginning, ‘Eκ Dιοςαρχωμεθα, or the divineness of his subject, the heavens - more sublime and pure matter than useth to be in the wanton pages of other poets. But our divine poet is of another alloy, and his holy song is of the same strain with that of Moses, of Deborah and Barak, of Hannah, of David, - qui noster Orpheus est, saith Euthymius, the "sweet singer of Israel," - of Solomon with his Song of Songs; saving that this is lugubre carmen, saith Oecolampadius, et tragediae quam comediae similius, a lamentable ditty, and more like a tragedy than a comedy; for, though the prophet beginneth merrily, yet he endeth heavily; it is of "mercy and judgment" that he singeth. To my well beloved,] i.e., To Christ, the Church’ s bridegroom, cuius amicus et administer sum, whose paranymph I am and well wisher; some render it for my beloved, or in his defence. A song.] Or, Poem, whereto this first verse is the proem or preface. A spiritual song it is, most artificially composed, and set out with the most exquisite skill that might be. Of my beloved.] Of him whom my soul loveth; Jonathan loved David (1.) With a love of union; (2.) With a love of complacence; (3.) With a love of benevolence. So doth a gracious heart love Jesus Christ. My Love was crucified, said Ignatius, whose heart was even a lump of love. Touching his vineyard.] That degenerate plant of a strange vine unto him, the plantation and supplantation whereof is here, first, Parabolically propounded; secondly, More plainly expounded. Some read it, "to his vineyard"; others, "for his vineyard." See Matthew 21:33-34 Mark 12:1-2 Luke 20:9; Luke 20:16. My beloved.] See how oft he harps upon this sweet string, and cannot come off. What a man loveth he will be talking of, as the huntsman of his hounds, the drunkard of his cups, the worldling of his wealth, &c.

V. (1) Now will I sing to my wellbeloved.—Literally, Now let me sing. The chapter bears every mark of being a distinct composition, perhaps the most elaborately finished in the whole of Isaiah. The parable with which it opens has for us the interest of having obviously supplied a starting-point for a later prophet (Jeremiah 2:21), and for our Lord’s teaching in the like parable of Mat 21:33-41. Here, however, there is the distinctive touch of the irony of the opening verse. The prophet presents himself, as it were, in the character of a minstrel, ready to sing to his hearers one of the love-songs in which their culture delighted (Amos 6:5.) In its language and rhythm it reminds us of the Song of Solomon. The very word “beloved” recalls Son 5:1-2; the description of the vineyards, that of Son 8:11-13. The probability that the parallelism was intentional is increased by the coincidence of Isa 7:23, and Son 8:11, which will meet us further on. On this assumption Isaiah’s words have a special interest as showing how early that poem lent itself to a mystical interpretation. One might almost conjecture that the prophet allured the people to listen by music as well as words, and appeared, as Elisha and other prophets had done, with harp or pipe in hand (2 Kings 3:15; 1 Samuel 10:5; 1 Samuel 16:23; Isaiah 30:29). The frequency of such hymns (Isaiah 12, 25, Isaiah 26:1-4) shows, at any rate, that the prophet had received the training of a psalmist. (See Introduction.) A song of my beloved.—A slightly different reading adopted by some critics gives A song of love. The “beloved” is purposely not named, but appears afterwards as none other than Jehovah. The word, closely connected with the ideal name Jedediah (the beloved of Jehovah; 2 Samuel 12:25), occurs in twenty-six passages of Song of Sol., and not elsewhere. A very fruitful hill.—Literally, a horn, the son of oil. The combination “horn of oil” in 1 Samuel 16:1; 1 Samuel 16:13, and 1 Kings 1:39, suggests the thought that the phrase is equivalent to “the horn of the anointed” (Kay). The term “horn” was a natural synonym for a hill. So we have Matterhorn, Aarhorn, &c., in the Alps. Oil was naturally symbolic of fertility. In Psalms 80:8-16, we have a striking parallel. The “fruitful hill” was Canaan as a whole, with a special reference to Judah and Jerusalem. The “choicest vine”—literally, vine of Sorek (Genesis 49:11; Jeremiah 2:21), bearing a small dark purple grape—pointed back to the fathers of the nation, who, idealised in the retrospect, were as the heroes of faith compared with the then present generation. The picture which forms the parable might almost take its place among the Georgics of Palestine. The vineyard on the hillside could not be ploughed, and therefore the stones had to be taken out by hand. It was fenced against the beasts of the field. There was a tower for a watchman to guard it against the attacks of robbers. (Comp. Virg. Georg. ii.

CHAPTER V This chapter begins with representing, in a beautiful parable, the tender care of God for his people, and their unworthy returns for his goodness, 1-7. The parable or allegory is then dropped; and the prophet, in plain terms, reproves and threatens them for their wickedness; particularly for their covetousness, 8-10; intemperance, 11; and inattention to the warnings of Providence, 12. Then follows an enumeration of judgments as the necessary consequence. Captivity and famine appear with all their horrors, 13. Hades, or the grave, like a ravenous monster, opens wide its jaws, and swallows down its myriads, 14. Distress lays hold on all ranks, 15; and God is glorified in the execution of his judgments, 16; till the whole place is left desolate, a place for the flocks to range in, 17. The prophet then pauses; and again resumes his subject, reproving them for several other sins, and threatening them with woes and vengeance, 18-24; after which he sums up the whole of his awful denunciation in a very lofty and spirited epiphonema or conclusion. The God of armies, having hitherto corrected to no purpose, is represented with inimitable majesty, as only giving a hist, and a swarm of nations hasten to his standard, 25-27. Upon a guilty race, unpitied by heaven or by earth, they execute their commission; and leave the land desolate and dark, without one ray of comfort to cheer the horrid gloom, 28-30. This chapter likewise stands single and alone, unconnected with the preceding or following. The subject of it is nearly the same with that of the first chapter. It is a general reproof of the Jews for their wickedness; but it exceeds that chapter in force, in severity, in variety, and elegance; and it adds a more express declaration of vengeance by the Babylonian invasion. NOTES ON CHAP. V Verse 1. Now will I sing to my well-beloved a song of my beloved - "Let me sing now a song," c.] A MS., respectable for its antiquity, adds the word שיר shir, a song, after נא na which gives so elegant a turn to the sentence by the repetition of it in the next member, and by distinguishing the members so exactly in the style and manner in the Hebrew poetical composition, that I am much inclined to think it genuine. A song of my beloved - "A song of loves"] דודי dodey, for דודים dodim: status constructus pro absoluto, as the grammarians say, as Micah 6:16; Lamentations 3:14; Lamentations 3:66, so Archbishop Secker. Or rather, in all these and the like cases, a mistake of the transcribers, by not observing a small stroke, which in many MSS., is made to supply the מ mem, of the plural, thus, דודי dodi. שירת דודים shirath dodim is the same with שיר ידידת shir yedidoth, Psalms 45:1. In this way of understanding it we avoid the great impropriety of making the author of the song, and the person to whom it is addressed, to be the same.

1–7. The Parable of the Vineyard and its ApplicationOne of the finest exhibitions of rhetorical skill and power which the book contains. The prophet appears in the guise of a minstrel before an assemblage of his countrymen, and proceeds to recite the unfortunate experience of a “friend” of his with his vineyard. The simple story, told in light popular verse, disarms the suspicions of the crowd, and the singer, having secured their sympathy, demands a verdict on the course which a man might be expected to pursue with so refractory a vineyard as this (Isaiah 5:3). The answer was so obvious that the people, like our Lord’s hearers on a similar occasion (Matthew 21:41), had practically assented to their own condemnation before they clearly perceived the drift of the discourse. But from this point onwards the parable becomes more and more transparent, till at last the prophet, with a sudden change of rhythm (see on Isaiah 5:6), throws off all disguise and drives home the lesson of the whole in the crashing lines of Isa 5:7. The idea of Israel as the Lord’s vineyard probably originated with Isaiah. (Cf. ch. Isaiah 3:14, Isaiah 27:2 ff.; Jeremiah 2:21; Jeremiah 12:10 f.; Psalms 80:8 ff.; Matthew 20:1 ff; Matthew 21:33 ff. and parallels.)

Now will I sing - This is an indication that what follows is poetic, or is adapted to be sung or chanted. To my well-beloved - The word used here - ידיד yedı̂yd - is a term of endearment.

1, 2. Now will I sing — Rather, Let me sing. The singing was in the form of chanting. Such was probably the mode of the delivery of Isaiah’s prophecy concerning this “vineyard” — the Jewish Church.