Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 350 · December 16
The Vineyard Inventory
“What could have been done more to my vineyard, that I have not done in it? wherefore, when I looked that it should bring forth grapes, brought it forth wild grapes?”
Isaiah opens this one as a love song. Now will I sing to my wellbeloved a song of my beloved touching his vineyard. Everyone knows the genre, and somebody is about to be praised.
Then comes the list of what the owner did, and the list is the piece. He fenced it. He gathered out the stones thereof, across a hillside, which is the labour nobody sings about. He planted it with the choicest vine. He built a tower, which is what you put up when you mean to stay for a long run of harvests. He made a winepress, before there was anything to press. Five decisions, all of them decisions to stay.
Then he asks the audience to arbitrate. And now, O inhabitants of Jerusalem, and men of Judah, judge, I pray you, betwixt me and my vineyard. What could have been done more to my vineyard, that I have not done in it? The people giving the verdict do not know yet that they are the vineyard, and they answer in their heads before they find out.
The undoing is the same list backwards. I will take away the hedge thereof, and it shall be eaten up; and break down the wall thereof, and it shall be trodden down: and I will lay it waste: it shall not be pruned, nor digged. The tower and the press go unmentioned. Jesus rebuilt the list item for item, and the temple courts knew the source: A certain man planted a vineyard, and set an hedge about it, and digged a place for the winefat, and built a tower. Then the identification here, which turns on two pairs of Hebrew words sitting a syllable apart: he looked for judgment, but behold oppression; for righteousness, but behold a cry. He listened for justice and heard a scream, and in Hebrew the two nearly rhyme.
Answer his question about one thing you have been given, as the arbitrator he asks you to be, since it is the only question the song puts to anybody. What more could have been done for it than was done, and what has come off the vine.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 350 is Help from the Creator (Psalm 121:1-2).