1. Let me sing to My beloved. This Parable of the Vineyard would become an early warrant for reading the Song of Songs as an allegory of the love between God and Israel. The lover here is clearly God, and the vineyard over which the lover labors is the people of Israel. In the Song of Songs, the body of the beloved is represented metaphorically as a vineyard.

on a hillside rich in soil. The translation of this phrase, following the proposal of Bleckinsopp, is conjectural. The literal sense of the Hebrew word is: “in a corner [or beam of light] son of oil.” The conjectured translation builds on the association of oil with fruitfulness and assumes that the word for “corner” might extend to a plot of land.

2. a tower. This would probably be a watchtower from which one could survey the vineyard and protect it from predators.

5. take away its hedge, and it shall turn to waste. The transparent referent of the unprotected vineyard that is trampled by wild beasts is the kingdom of Judah, shorn of defenses, which is overrun by invading armies.

6. And I will charge the clouds / not to rain on it. The weather conspires with wild beasts to destroy the vineyard.

7. justice . . . jaundice . . . righteousness . . . wretchedness. This translation proposes English equivalents for the Hebrew wordplay, where the meaning of the two second terms is somewhat different. The Hebrew is mishpat, “justice,” mispaḥ, “blight,” and tsedaqah, “righteousness,” tseʿaqah, “scream.”

8. Woe, who add house to house, / who put field together with field. The social injustice against which the prophet inveighs is the consolidation of real estate—houses and fields—in the hands of the exploitative rich, who thus drive the peasantry from their possessions.

9. In the hearing of the LORD of Armies. The literal sense is: in the ears of the LORD of Armies. One must assume that the prophet himself, not God, speaks the lines that follow, beginning with this formula because he is pronouncing, with God as his witness, a solemn vow about the destruction to come.

10. a single bat . . . an ephah. These are two small units of solid measure, against “ten acres” (literally, “ten yokes”) and a large measure, the ḥomer.

11. strong drink. Since the Samson story appears to indicate that this drink, sheikhar, is derived from grapes but is different from wine, it probably means grappa. Archaeologists have discovered the apparatus for making grappa.

12. who do not regard the LORD’s deeds. Since they spend their days drinking and carousing, from early morning until evening, they would be in a perpetual drunken stupor, scarcely in a condition to take note of the great things God has done.

13. Therefore is My people exiled. Verb tenses in ancient Hebrew poetry are fluid and at times ambiguous, and one suspects that the prophets purposefully exploited the ambiguity. The exile is so certain that it is as if it had already happened, or it is about to happen, or it will happen before too long.

14. Sheol has widened its gullet. Sheol, the underworld, often imagined as a great pit, is represented here as a kind of hungry monster swallowing those marked for destruction.

her splendor. The feminine possessive refers to the people.

15. and humans are bowed low. This line picks up the refrain from the prophecy in chapter 2.

17. and goats shall feed. The Masoretic Text here reads garim, “sojourners,” but this translation follows the Septuagint, which appears to have used a Hebrew text that read gedayim, “goats.” (The Hebrew letters for r and d look quite similar.)

in the ruins of the fatted. The Hebrew here is rather compressed, with meiḥim, “fatted,” a word that generally refers to fatted animals, but the evident reference is to the overstuffed rich, who have gorged themselves on the resources of the poor.

19. Let Him hurry. This whole speech is an expression of the arrogant complacency of the evildoers: let God hurry and carry out His plans—we are not worried.

21. in their own opinion. The literal sense of the Hebrew is “before their own faces.” The phrase is clearly parallel in meaning to “in their own eyes” in the first verset.

22. mighty to drink wine / and men of valor to mix strong drink. The heavy sarcasm is palpable: in this vehement denunciation, the prophet scarcely aims for subtlety.

24. as a tongue of fire consumes straw / and hay falls apart in flame. The structure of this line is chiastic: in the first verset, fire is the grammatical subject, consuming the straw; in the second verset, the grammatical subject is the hay, disintegrating in the flame. The verb in the second verset usually means to go slack or become weak, but something like falling apart is required by the context.

26. He shall raise a banner for nations from afar. God is represented as a kind of general, giving the order for the invading armies to attack. The identity of the armies is left unstated, heightening the ominous effect, although Isaiah and his audience would surely have had the imperial forces of Assyria in mind.

27. among them. The Hebrew says “among him,” but the sliding between singular and plural, especially for collective nouns, that is natural in Hebrew needs to be sorted out for English legibility.

28. The hooves of his horses are hard as flint / and his wheels like the whirlwind. This is one of many instances in which the poetic power of Prophetic verse pushes, perhaps not intentionally, in the direction of apocalypse. What the prophet means to do is to make frighteningly vivid through his poetry the terrible onslaught of foreign invaders that is about to overwhelm the kingdom of Judah. The hyperbolic force, however, of the language he uses is so strong that the attacking army begins to look apocalyptic—its troops unslumbering, the hooves of its horses like flint, the wheels of its chariots like the whirlwind.

29. He has a roar like the lion. The representation of martial fierceness in the image of the lion is conventional in ancient Near Eastern poetry, but the prophet makes the familiar trope vivid in the way he highlights the roaring and then links it to the roaring of the sea.

30. And he shall howl against him on that day. Hebrew usage has a certain propensity to multiply pronominal references: the initial “he” (merely indicated through the conjugated form of the verb “shall howl”) is of course the cruel enemy, whereas “against him” refers to the people of Israel.

and he shall peer toward the earth. Since what is seen is a dismaying landscape of disaster, “he” would again have the unstated antecedent of the people of Israel.

constricting darkness. The Hebrew is very compressed, but this is the most likely meaning.

and the light shall go dark in its clouds. Again, the poetic imagery is incipiently apocalyptic: it is dark on the earth and dark in the heavens as well. This is a reversal of the first moment of creation, when “let there be light” drives back the primordial darkness that is over the face of the abyss. The suffix indicating “its” in the Hebrew is feminine and so must refer to “the earth,” the only feminine noun in this verse. The word for clouds, ʿarifim, appearing only here, is high poetic diction, a designation linked with a verbal stem that means to drip down, as the clouds yield rain.