Isaiah’s chapter 27, to those who venture into this fearsome corner of the book, is known best for two vigorous images: The first is YHWH’s destruction of a great serpent named ‘Leviathan’. The second is the ensuing, second ‘vineyard poem’, second precisely because it stands as counterpart to the grim first vineyard song of chapter 5.
In my view, the sequence is not casual or unimportant. Leviathan’s death-wish opposition must be dealt with before Israel can flourish like a vineyard.
In the midst comes a little agriculturally grounded oracle that I will argue is specifically viticultural, introduced and lightly set off from its immediate context by a variation on the familiar introductory expression ‘in that day…’:
In days to come Jacob shall take root, Israel shall blossom and put forth shoots, and fill the whole world with fruit.
Isaiah 27.6 (NRSV, emphasis added)
The verse has numerous textual uncertainties, but they do not meaningfully obscure its intent.
Clearly the oracle presents Jacob/Israel as some kind of plant, the metaphor forged of the three verbs I have italicized above. The verse does not precisely name the plant, but three matters encourage the reader to envisage a grapevine. First, the more general tendency to imagine Israel/Jacob as a vineyard sets the stage for such a reading, most famously that much more explicit first vineyard song of chapter 5. Second, the immediately prior context—interrupted only by the temporal clause באים (NRSV: ‘in days to come’)—sets our minds precisely on a vineyard rather than on some other arena of agricultural endeavor. Third, each of the verbs rests well within a metaphorical frame that is not merely agricultural, but specifically viticultural.
These considerations lead us to the grand conclusion of this very diminutive oracle.
…and (this vine, Israel/Jacob shall) fill the whole world with fruit.
Isaiah 27.6 (NRSV, clarification added)
NRSV’s ‘with fruit’ is interpretative, although not objectionably so, since תנובה can mean agricultural produce of nearly any kind. NRSV’s reading merely recognizes the vine metaphor that I am arguing is inevitable.
Importantly, the oracle’s conclusion seems to require us to assume two conclusions that we ignore to our interpretative loss.
First, we are to envisage an expansion that is slow, organic, and in this way inevitable, all of which contrasts with the image of Leviathan’s ways and means, redolent as they are with the suddenness and ordinarily short duration of combat. Leviathan subdued, Jacob/Israel will occupy his real or intended realm, though in a very different manner than the ancient, twisting serpent.
Second, Jacob/Israel will engage, according to this prophetic vision, in something other than mere conquest. One tyrant does not here supplant and replace another. Rather, this vine shall fill the whole world with its fruit. It seems mean to this interpreter to begrudge the implication that inhabitants of that world who are not sons and daughters of Jacob/Israel will taste and be nourished by the fruit of this vine.
So does the prophetic eye imagine an expanding blessing for the nations that is anchored in the YHWH-cultivated vine that is Israel. Other, less generous readings of this verse are of course plausible. But a reading with the grain of the Isaianic vision likely favors this less stingy appropriation of a tiny verse that punches well above its diminutive weight.
Canter Bridge 