Canter Bridge

In spite of its structural intricacy, the Song of the Vineyard in the book of Isaiah’s fifth chapter comes across with formidable blunt force. As parables go, it is brief. One surmises that the prophet led his listeners along the path of a well-told tale, then hit them in the gut with its damning burden.

YHWH himself, staged as the vinedresser, speaks this way:

What more was there to do for my vineyard
that I have not done in it?
When I expected it to yield grapes,
why did it yield wild grapes?

Indeed, a kind of indignant rage permeates the material of the book’s first half. Rarely in the Hebrew Scriptures is YHWH portrayed with such vulnerable and wounded indignation. Some early translators of the work, perhaps intuiting that such transparent sentiment was unworthy of their deity, used their translators’ prerogative and a verbal airbrush to tweak the offending material and render YHWH a more august, unfeeling judge.

Yet for us, readers of the Hebrew book of Isaiah as it comes down to us in fine, modern, English translation, it is necessary to stand before that remarkable phenomenon that has traditionally been labeled ‘the wrath of God’. Outside the parabolic interlude, the text refers to it time and again by claiming in its narrative of Judah’s depravation that ‘for all this his anger has not turned away, and his hand is stretched out still.’

One begins best to understand this celestial rage on the terms in which the book itself presents it. By that light, it is the righteous indignation of a generous deity before a people that have irrationally and egregiously spurned all semblance of relationship with their benefactor. One begins to sense, at least within the purview of the book’s author(s), the reasonableness of YHWH’s pain.

Then again, the book frames YHWH’s anger within a plot that underscores his aggressively stubborn determination to turn matters towards a better end, to find reconciliation with this people and to saturate their destiny with that fulness of wellbeing that we call blessing.

Finally, there is no doubt that the book is more cavalier about the cost of a people’s rebellion than modern sensitivities—trained from mother’s breast to refuse to believe that anthing matters all that much—can comfortably accept. In this book, YHWH’s anger is destined to create casualties about which little remorse is expressed on the way to purging out a remnant that will live in his planned blessing. We recoil from such finality, for we believe among our many suppositions that no god’s reputation matters that much and that people ought at almost any cost be marked off from suffering, especially when this is judicial or retributive.

One utility of this large book might be to ask ourselves why we believe such things. In a moment in which we have learned to recognize motive and power behind all thought and action, these might prove worthy subjects of our inspection as we respond or react to the ‘wrath of God’ that Isaiah throws up before us in unsparing relief.