Thursday, December 07, 2023

There was a landowner who planted a vineyard (Isaiah 5)

Isaiah chapter five is very poetic, and it opens with a parable of a vineyard. There is a vineyard that is explained to be Israel, but despite the owner of the vineyard doing everything to help it thrive, it only brought forth "wild grapes", which I don't know anything about grapes, but I assume are highly inferior. The idea here is definitely that in establishing the nation of Israel (and later Judah), God expected it to create a spiritually healthy people, but in the end, they kept turning to sin. So the owner of the vineyard tears down the wall, i.e. God removes his protection from Israel and Judah. Furthermore, Isaiah prophesies that the land of Judah is going to be agriculturally poor. (This may once again be natural consequences, as God told the Jews to plant for six years and let the land lie fallow for one, which is actually good agricultural practice, as land gets sort of used up, and needs to rest. The Israelites never did this.)

The question of whether it's okay to drink alcohol I answered most fully in Luke chapter one, but I think it's clear here that verse 11 is talking about someone who clearly drinks to excess. In verse 14, I question the KJV's translation of "hell" here; I don't think there's much indication that Jews before Jesus's time had a real concept of Hell, and the Hebrew word here is "sheol", which is more commonly translated as "the grave". I think once again Isaiah is reiterating that there is going to be a lot of people dying. As for sheol being a woman, Hebrew is a gendered language and sheol is a feminine noun, so the use of "she" follows. Verse 20 is a fairly well-known verse, reading, "Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil," which the SAB notes as "Good stuff" quite rightly; I suppose one of the biggest beefs the SAB has with the Bible is that it feels the Bible does this in many places. Isaiah follows this with a couple other woes, leading him to imply that evil people will be like chaff that is burned up, and their carcasses will lie in the street, which the SAB marks as cruel and intolerant. However, this is God being "intolerant" of evil, so it's hard to say they didn't deserve punishment. God lifts up foreign nations against Judah, making them mighty. Isaiah says that in doing this, God "will hiss unto them from the end of the earth." The SAB marks this phrase as absurd, and I'll agree that it's weird imagery.

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