Isaiah on Ancient Israel's Failure
Imagining justice and righteousness
Merna and I are slow-reading our way through the biblical book of Isaiah. We’re assisted in this by the lovely commentary by Gordon McConville (in the Baker Commentary on the Old Testament Prophetic Books; Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2023). (It’s good to go slowly.)
It’s a wonderful thing to read a verse, or 2, or 10, but usually not more than 10, read McConville’s comments, the more elaborate of which are more fun for me than Merna, since Gordon gets into the weeds of exegesis, as he should in this commentary. I sometimes read out phrases in Hebrew that have a lot of assonance, so that Merna can at least have a taste of the artistry that has gone into a book such as this.
I’m also delighted to say that we’re having a lot of fun doing this. We’re finding—both of us—that many of these texts are much clearer to us now than they were at any earlier point in our lives. That’s a testimony to the importance of rereading; there’s always something new.
Quite a number of themes in the book are already filling our minds. In this entry, I’ll just cover one of them.
A few verses from Isaiah 5:
(1) I will sing for my beloved my song about his vineyard. My beloved had a vineyard, situated on a richly fertile hill. (2) He dug it over, cleared it of stones, and planted it with a fine vine. . . . but it yielded rotten grapes. . . .
(4) What more could I have done to my vineyard that I did not do? . . . (5) I will take away its hedge, and it will be devoured; I will break down its protecting wall, and it will become a trampling place. (6) I will make it a wasteland, neither pruned nor hoed. Briars and thorns will grow there. . . .
(7) For the vineyard of Yahweh of Hosts is the house of Israel, and the people of Judah the plantation of his delight. He longed for justice, and there came bloodshed! For righteousness, and there came a cry!
This “Song of the Vineyard” as it’s known is one of the more famous passages in which God expresses deep disappointment at the response of the people of Judah/Israel to the care with which they’ve been provided. The general description in these few verses is elaborated in the remainder of the chapter, the prophet using a series of “woe” sayings.
The first group addressed are the land-grabbers, those who accumulate for themselves wealth in the form of real estate at the expense of their neighbors. Instead of the goal of a community that cared for one another and found solace in neighborliness, as Yahweh envisioned, the land-grabbers will find themselves alone: “Many houses will be left as ruins . . . with no one in them” (5:9). Next, party-goers who have nothing better to do than drink will end up profoundly thirsty (5:13). And so on. The “punishment” for—or probably more accurately, the consequences of—their actions will be results that fit the original crimes, a reversal of what the perpetrators had hoped for.
All of the acts the prophet addresses are failures to practice justice and righteousness. In their manner of life, they have imagined that not following the “instruction” of Yahweh will not have consequences.
The prophet traces the root of this attitude back to their lack of understanding the “plan” of Yahweh. McConville says: “Running through the book is the promise that Yahweh has a plan of judgment and salvation that is being worked out in the history of Judah and the nations” (p. 93). Key to this is that Yahweh’s “plan” for Judah was that it had been chosen as a “light to the nations,” a beacon of justice and righteousness. That Judah was failing in this intent is clear from their failure to be a community of people who cared for one another as Yahweh cared for them.
I need to stop a moment and say something about this. I’m personally very familiar with this sort of language—at least the “justice and righteousness is required” language. When I was young, I would have heard this (and I think it was explained to me this way, too) as not lying to my parents, not hitting siblings, doing my chores, and all that sort of thing. Certainly, that’s not excluded. And those things are very helpful to the creation and sustenance of a family that cares for one another.
But I think that something larger is going on in this text. Israel’s (and Judah’s; I’m using them relatively interchangeably here, in part because in this chapter Isaiah does so) mission, as “a light to the nations,” was in its largest conception to create an example of what a just, caring, loving society looked like. Its failure to do this was a deep disappointment to Yahweh. His allowing the consequences of their failure to wreak havoc with their desires was intended to get their attention back onto their primary mission. It was not all about them; Yahweh’s reach was much broader.
McConville catches this so very well in a phrase that stopped both Merna and me as we were reading his reflections: “The prophet calls people, not to a legal obedience, but to respond to Yahweh relationally, mirroring his vision for the good of the world and turning it imaginatively into practice” (pp. 98–99). [Emphasis is mine—JEE]
He’s given us an imagination. Am I using my imagination to mirror God’s vision for the world? Are you?