The Song of the Vineyard — Isaiah 5
Isaiah opens chapter 5 with a love song, lets his listeners pass sentence on a failed vineyard, and only then tells them the vineyard is them. The Book of Mormon holds the other half of the song.
A Love Song That Becomes a Courtroom
“Now will I sing to my wellbeloved a song of my beloved touching his vineyard” (Isaiah 5:1). Nobody in Jerusalem hears a sermon coming; they hear a story about a farmer, and Judah knew what a vineyard cost. So Isaiah lists the work: he fenced it, gathered out the stones, planted the choicest vine, built a tower in the midst of it, and cut a winepress — and a winepress is built for a harvest you are sure of. It brought forth wild grapes! The Hebrew be’ushim means stinking or worthless things — not a thin crop but a rotten one.
“And now, O inhabitants of Jerusalem, and men of Judah, judge, I pray you, betwixt me and my vineyard. What could have been done more to my vineyard, that I have not done in it? wherefore, when I looked that it should bring forth grapes, brought it forth wild grapes?”
Who is asked to be the judge? The men of Judah, handed the case before they know they are the defendant; any honest farmer rules the same way — tear down the hedge. Then verse 7 springs the trap: “the vineyard of the Lord of hosts is the house of Israel.” They have already agreed to the sentence.
Nathan did this to David, whose anger “was greatly kindled” at the rich man before he heard “Thou art the man” (2 Samuel 12:5–7). Jesus did it with this same vineyard, and His hearers pronounced their own sentence: “He will miserably destroy those wicked men” (Matthew 21:40–41). Why teach this way? Because a man judges a story fairly that he would never judge fairly about himself.
“What Could Have Been Done More?” — Zenos Asks It Too
Verse 4 is a question. “Wherefore” is a why — the Lord is not reporting a crop failure, He is asking His people to explain one. And verse 2 already answered what more He could have done. NOTHING was left undone, so the fault is not in the farmer.
Most Bible readers stop there, but the same Lord asks the same question in the Book of Mormon. In Zenos’s allegory the house of Israel is a tame olive tree nourished in the Lord’s vineyard (Jacob 5:3), and when the trees go bad the Lord asks, three times over, “What could I have done more for my vineyard?” (5:41, 47, 49). But Zenos shows what Isaiah 5 leaves out. The first time He asks it, “the Lord of the vineyard wept.” The second time He adds, “I have stretched forth mine hand almost all the day long.” Isaiah asks it from the bench; Zenos asks it from inside the vineyard, with tears.
Is the laid-waste vineyard of verse 6 the end of the story? No — Zenos’s allegory runs past the burning to one last season, when the Lord calls servants to labor with Him and the natural fruit is good again, “even like as it was in the beginning” (Jacob 5:75).
One Letter Off — Fruit That Looked Right
What were the wild grapes? Verse 7 says, in one of the best-known puns in the Hebrew Bible. He looked for judgment! but oppression. For righteousness, but behold a cry! In Hebrew each bad fruit differs from the good one by a single letter.
Isaiah 5:7 — the sound-alike pairs
“he looked for judgment” — mishpat
“but behold oppression” — mispach
“for righteousness” — tsedaqah
“but behold a cry” — tse’aqah
The ear hears what it expected; the meaning is the opposite.
Donald W. Parry gives the pairs in Search Diligently the Words of Isaiah: the Lord “looked for mishpat, but behold mispach; for tzedaqah, but behold tze’aqah” (RSC). Nicholas Schaser notes that the difference “is a matter of only one letter” (Israel Bible Center). The cry is the outcry of the wronged.
Why does that matter? Because the wild grapes were not obviously wild. Judah still had courts and still had religion, and from the road the vineyard looked fine. Only up close did the Lord find that the judgment was bloodshed and the righteousness was a scream. It was counterfeit fruit — the right shape, the right sound, the wrong substance. It is the most dangerous kind of apostasy, because it never feels like leaving.
Six Woes, and a Verse That Turns Itself Upside Down
Verses 8–23 name the grapes. Woe to those who join house to house and field to field, “that they may be placed alone in the midst of the earth” (5:8–10); “the seed of an homer shall yield an ephah” — a tenth of what was sown. Woe to those who rise up early — to drink until night, while “they regard not the work of the Lord” (5:11–12). Woe to those who pull sin “as it were with a cart rope” and still say, “hasten his work, that we may see it” (5:18–19). They want the Lord to come. They are not ready for Him to.
Isaiah 5:20 — three chiasms (Parry)
A Woe unto them that call evil
B good,
B′ and good
A′ evil;
then again: darkness / light — light / darkness;
and again: bitter / sweet — sweet / bitter!
Each pair is stated, then stated reversed. The words trade places the way the values have.
Donald Parry notes that “the terms evil and good are presented once and then again in reverse order” (“Chiasmus,” RSC), and the repeated words show it. What is the form doing? It performs the sin. People who call evil good seldom deny that good and evil exist — they keep both words and swap them, and the verse swaps them three times so the reader hears the inversion before he thinks about it. It rarely happens in one step: evil is excused, then called normal, then called good, and at last the man who still calls it evil is the one called wicked. The last woes show where that road ends: the wise in their own eyes, and judges who “justify the wicked for reward, and take away the righteousness of the righteous from him” (5:21–23).
How does anyone avoid it, when the counterfeit sounds so much like the real thing? Mormon gave the answer: “the Spirit of Christ is given to every man, that he may know good from evil,” and the way to judge is as plain “as the daylight is from the dark night” (Moroni 7:15–16). Daylight and dark night — Isaiah’s two words, put back in their right order.
“His Hand Is Stretched Out Still”
“Therefore is the anger of the Lord kindled against his people, and he hath stretched forth his hand against them, and hath smitten them… For all this his anger is not turned away, but his hand is stretched out still.”
The last line becomes a refrain, closing each stanza of judgment in Isaiah 9:12, 17, 21 and 10:4. In its own verse the hand is raised to strike — He stretched it forth “against them.” An honest reading starts there.
Yet the Church’s seminary manual says Isaiah “may have intended more than one meaning” with the phrase, “because the Lord’s hand can be extended for both justice and mercy” (Lesson 118). Elder Jeffrey R. Holland, speaking to any who think they “have done too much that was too wrong for too long,” said that “this conference calls out Jehovah’s unrelenting refrain, ‘[My] hand is stretched out still,’” and he paired it with “mine arm is lengthened out all the day long” (2 Nephi 28:32; “Prophets in the Land Again,” 2006).
Is the mercy reading forced? The vineyard says it is not. Zenos’s Lord stretched forth His hand “almost all the day long” while He “digged about it” and “pruned it” — a hand held out to save, not to strike. And Jacob, explaining that allegory the next chapter, says it plainly: “he stretches forth his hands unto them all the day long,” and “while his arm of mercy is extended towards you in the light of the day, harden not your hearts” (Jacob 6:4–5). The same hand does both. It strikes a people who will not turn, and it stays out, reaching, while there is still day. The Lord may destroy them — but His hand is outstretched still.
The refrain grows into a four-stanza poem in chapters 9 and 10; Immanuel and the Child — Isaiah 7–9 takes it up in full.
An Ensign and a Whistle from the End of the Earth
“And he will lift up an ensign to the nations from far, and will hiss unto them from the end of the earth: and, behold, they shall come with speed swiftly”
An ensign is a banner raised as a rally point, and to “hiss” is to whistle, as a shepherd calls a flock. Who answers? A people who come fast, where “none shall slumber nor sleep,” with hoofs “like flint, and their wheels like a whirlwind,” roaring “like young lions” (5:27–29).
There are two readings, and both deserve a hearing. In the flow of the chapter the swift army comes as judgment: they “roar against them,” and the land is left in “darkness and sorrow” (5:30). God whistles up a foreign power to break down the wall. That reading is sound, yet Isaiah uses the same ensign later for gathering, not war: the Lord “shall set up an ensign for the nations, and shall assemble the outcasts of Israel” (Isaiah 11:12). And Zion, the Lord told Joseph Smith, “shall be an ensign unto the people” (D&C 64:42).
Here is a link few readers catch. In 2 Nephi 29:2 the Lord says of Nephi’s record, “my words shall hiss forth unto the ends of the earth, for a standard unto my people, which are of the house of Israel.” Hiss, ends of the earth, standard — the vocabulary of verse 26, applied to the Book of Mormon ITSELF.
So Latter-day Saints have long read these verses as the gathering. Elder LeGrand Richards, thinking of trains and airplanes, asked, “How better could ‘Their roaring… be like a lion’ than in the roar of the airplane?” (A Marvelous Work and a Wonder, 1967, 236, quoted in Farley, RSC). Must we choose? Isaiah writes in patterns, and a pattern can be fulfilled more than once. Israel was cut down, and will come back as a young lion.
Key References — Isaiah 5
- Jacob 5 — Zenos’s allegory, the fullest answer in scripture to “what could have been done more?”
- Jacob 6:4–5 — the hand as mercy.
- 2 Nephi 15 — Isaiah 5 in the Book of Mormon.
- Moroni 7:14–19 — judging good from evil by the light of Christ.
Which Grapes Is Our Vineyard Growing?
Isaiah 5 was written to a covenant people, not to strangers. The Lord fenced us too, with covenants, temples, prophets, and the Book of Mormon. So the question in verse 4 is ours to answer, and the danger is the one verse 7 names. Wild grapes look like judgment and sound like righteousness. Can we tell? Only up close, only by the light Mormon described, and only if we will hear “Thou art the man.”
But the song does not end in the ruined vineyard, and neither does Zenos. The Lord who asked the question wept as He asked it and came back to labor one more season. He is lifting the ensign NOW. Great are the words of Isaiah (3 Nephi 23:1) — and this one is a song we are in.
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