The Earth Mourns and the Vineyard Sings — Isaiah 24 and 27

Isaiah 24 silences the songs and lets the earth itself mourn. Chapter 27 hands the song back — to the vineyard the Lord once laid waste, now watered every moment and gathered one olive at a time.

Where the Wine Ran Out

Chapters 24–27 are often read as one vision, Isaiah’s “little apocalypse.” The songs in the middle, and the broken covenant of 24:5, have their own page (Isaiah 25–26); this one takes the chapters on either side. What holds them together? Wine and song.

Isaiah 24:7–9 and 27:2 — the song taken and given back

(24:7) “The new wine mourneth, the vine languisheth”

(24:9) “They shall not drink wine with a song”

(27:2) “sing ye unto her, A vineyard of red wine”

Our arrangement. The Hebrew words vary, but the images repeat: wine and singing stop in chapter 24 and return, to a vineyard, in chapter 27.

The earth mourns in chapter 24. By chapter 27 the vineyard sings. Between them, death dies.

As with the People, So with the Priest

“Behold, the Lord maketh the earth empty, and maketh it waste, and turneth it upside down” (Isaiah 24:1). Verse 2 lists who is exempt, in six pairs. Nobody.

Isaiah 24:2 — altar, household, market

as with the people, so with the priest;

as with the servant, so with his master; as with the maid, so with her mistress;

as with the buyer, so with the seller; as with the lender, so with the borrower; as with the taker of usury, so with the giver of usury to him.

Our grouping: altar, home, marketplace. Every station gets the same sentence.

Who stands first after the people? The priest, for office in the house of God is no shelter. The Lord told the latter-day Church that His vengeance would begin “upon my house,” with “those among you … who have professed to know my name and have not known me” (D&C 112:25–26). Why begin there? Because only a people who HAVE the covenant can break it.

“Wo, Wo Is Me, the Mother of Men”

“The earth mourneth and fadeth away” (24:4). The verb is ’abal, to mourn as for the dead, and most of us read it as poetry. But why does the earth mourn? “The earth also is defiled under the inhabitants thereof; because they have transgressed the laws.” The ground is not the sinner; it carries the sin of those who live on it.

Enoch heard the earth itself speak:

Moses 7:48

“Wo, wo is me, the mother of men; I am pained, I am weary, because of the wickedness of my children. When shall I rest, and be cleansed from the filthiness which is gone forth out of me?”

It is Isaiah 24:4–5 given a voice, and Enoch wept to hear it.

Now set Isaiah 24 beside section 88, as few readers do. Who has “transgressed the laws”? The inhabitants. And the earth? “The earth abideth the law of a celestial kingdom, for it filleth the measure of its creation, and transgresseth not the law” (D&C 88:25). In the whole chapter the ONE party that kept the law is the one called defiled. The earth mourns because it is obedient and its children are not.

And its question is answered. “For the space of a thousand years the earth shall rest” (Moses 7:64); and “notwithstanding it shall die, it shall be quickened again … and the righteous shall inherit it” (D&C 88:26). The mourner will be crowned.

Fear, the Pit, and the Snare

Even here a remnant is left, “as the shaking of an olive tree” (24:13), the few olives the harvesters missed, and they sing: “From the uttermost part of the earth have we heard songs, even glory to the righteous.”

And Isaiah? “But I said, My leanness, my leanness, woe unto me! the treacherous dealers have dealt treacherously” (24:16) — five words from one Hebrew root in a single breath. He hears praise far off and betrayal close by, and will not wish the second away because of the first. It is the man who cried “Woe is me” in Isaiah 6.

Then a line for the ear: “Fear, and the pit, and the snare” — pachad, pachat, pach. Flee the fear and you fall into the pit; climb out and the snare takes you, “for the windows from on high are open” (24:17–18). Genesis uses the same Hebrew noun and verb for the Flood: “the windows of heaven were opened” (Genesis 7:11). Isaiah tells the end in the language of Noah’s day.

“The earth shall reel to and fro like a drunkard” (24:20), and the Lord repeated the image to His Church as a sign to watch for (D&C 88:87). But why does the drunkard stagger? “The transgression thereof shall be heavy upon it.” He is carrying someone else’s load.

“After Many Days Shall They Be Visited”

The Lord “shall punish the host of the high ones that are on high, and the kings of the earth upon the earth,” and they “shall be shut up in the prison, and after many days shall they be visited” (24:21–22).

The King James hides a key. “Punish” in verse 21 and “visited” in verse 22 are the SAME Hebrew verb, paqad, to attend to, to come and deal with. It runs through these chapters: in 27:1 He will paqad Leviathan, and in 27:3 it is what He will let no one do to His vineyard. The visit that shuts the prison comes back, after many days, for the prisoners.

The Doctrine and Covenants keeps Isaiah’s English word: “the spirits of men kept in prison, whom the Son visited, and preached the gospel unto them” (D&C 76:73). Peter says Christ “preached unto the spirits in prison; which sometime were disobedient … in the days of Noah” (1 Peter 3:19–20). Many Protestants hear doom there. Joseph Smith quoted Isaiah 24:20–22 in full in an 1842 editorial, then drew the line:

Joseph Smith, Times and Seasons, 15 April 1842

“Thus we find that God will deal with all the human family equally; and that as the antediluvians had their day of visitation; so will those characters referred to by Isaiah, have their time of visitation, and deliverance, after having been many days in prison.”

Nothing was forced onto the Bible. The verb was always Isaiah’s (see also Isaiah 60–62).

Leviathan Slain, and a Vineyard Kept

Chapter 27 opens with a monster: the Lord “shall punish leviathan the piercing serpent, even leviathan that crooked serpent; and he shall slay the dragon that is in the sea” (27:1). Tablets from Ugarit tell of Baal slaying a dragon named Lotan, “the Canaanite equivalent to ‘Leviathan’” (Mark Sneed, Tyndale House). Canaan gave that victory to Baal; Isaiah gives it to the Lord ALONE, and John names the serpent: “the dragon, that old serpent, which is the Devil” (Revelation 20:2).

Then, “in that day,” a song. Chapter 5 had a vineyard song too, and it ended in desolation. The Cambridge Bible calls this one “the counterpart” of Isaiah 5 (Bible Hub):

Isaiah 5 and 27:2–6 — the song reversed

(5:2) “it brought forth wild grapes”

(27:6) “fill the face of the world with fruit”

(5:6) “rain no rain upon it”

(27:3) “I will water it every moment”

(5:6) “there shall come up briers and thorns”

(27:4) “Fury is not in me: who would set the briers and thorns against me?”

Our layout of the pairing: each loss in chapter 5 is answered in chapter 27.

The briers and thorns are the same Hebrew pair both times, shamir and shayit. In chapter 5 the Lord lets them overrun the vineyard; in chapter 27 they are its enemies, and He goes through them to defend it. What changed? Not His care; in 5:4 He had already asked what more He could have done. Verse 5 names the change: “let him take hold of my strength, that he may make peace with me; and he shall make peace with me.” The vine takes hold of the Keeper.

Beaten Out and Gathered One by One

First Jacob’s iniquity is “purged” (27:9) — kipper, the atonement word once spoken over Isaiah’s lips. Then the gathering, in a picture almost everyone reads past. “The Lord shall beat off from the channel of the river unto the stream of Egypt, and ye shall be gathered one by one, O ye children of Israel” (27:12). “Beat off” is chabat, the verb for beating an olive tree, and what the beaters left was “for the stranger, for the fatherless, and for the widow” (Deuteronomy 24:20). “Gathered” is laqat, to glean. Where else do the two verbs meet? In Ruth: “she gleaned in the field until even, and beat out that she had gleaned” (Ruth 2:17). A Moabite widow picking up what others left, one stalk at a time, and gathered into the line of David.

Back in 24:13 the remnant was “as the shaking of an olive tree,” the olives nobody bothered with. Chapter 27 is the Lord coming back for them. He beats the tree Himself, and picks them up le’achad echad, one by one.

Elder Bruce R. McConkie read it as the way the Church grows in every land: “Israel shall be gathered one by one, family by family, unto the stakes of Zion established in all parts of the earth” (April 1977). Has it ever happened another way? Not nations in a day, but a knock at a door, one baptism, one family sealed.

And the chapter closes on the sound that calls them: “the great trumpet shall be blown, and they shall come which were ready to perish” (27:13).

Key References

Between the Mourning and the Song

Where are we living? Mostly in chapter 24. The treacherous still deal treacherously, and a faithful person can hear songs from the ends of the earth and still say, with Isaiah, “my leanness.” He did not pretend, and neither should we.

But the verb that locks the prison is the verb that comes back to open it. The Lord who once withheld the rain now waters His vineyard every moment and says “Fury is not in me.” He does not gather by the nation but by the olive — including the ones who thought they were left for good.

What does He ask of the vine? Only verse 5: take hold of His strength, and make peace with Him. The earth mourns now. The vineyard WILL sing.

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