Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 65 · March 6
Tender Grapes
“Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines: for our vines have tender grapes.”
A hillside vineyard in the second week of flowering. Nothing on the vine is worth eating yet. The blossom is set, the fruit is weeks away, and anything that gets in among the rows now takes the whole season with it instead of one meal.
That is where the line sits. Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines: for our vines have tender grapes. A great many sermons have turned those foxes into small besetting sins, the little compromises that eat away at a Christian life, and the poem is doing nothing of the kind. This is a love song between a man and a woman, printed in Scripture without apology and without an allegory attached. The foxes are foxes. The vineyard is a vineyard, and the Song has been using vineyards for the woman's own keeping since chapter one, where she says my mother's children were angry with me; they made me the keeper of the vineyards; but mine own vineyard have I not kept.
Even the Hebrew is uncertain here. The line is short, the speaker is unnamed, and Bibles split over whether the vines have tender grapes or the vineyards are in blossom, which is one stage described twice. It may be a scrap of a work song lifted into the poem. Nobody can tell you with confidence who is speaking or to whom.
What survives all of that is the timing. The season named as needing a guard is the one with nothing yet to show for itself. Anybody can see the danger in a vineyard hanging with fruit. This is the earlier moment, when a loss would not look like one to a stranger on the path.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 65 is Ask for Wisdom (James 1:5).