Commentary - Isaiah 5:8-30

Bird's-eye view

In this latter portion of Isaiah 5, the prophet pronounces a series of six woes upon the covenant people of Judah. A biblical "woe" is not a hand-wringing expression of pity, but rather a formal declaration of impending judgment. It is a covenant lawsuit, with God as the plaintiff and judge, and His people as the defendants. Isaiah, as God's herald, lays out the charges with devastating precision. The sins catalogued here are not minor infractions; they are deep-seated rebellions that strike at the heart of God's law and character. From economic greed and hedonistic indulgence to brazen mockery of God and the deliberate inversion of all moral standards, Judah had become rotten from the inside out. The passage concludes with an inescapable verdict: because they have rejected the law of Yahweh, Yahweh will summon a distant, terrifying nation to execute His righteous anger upon them. This is a sobering reminder that covenantal privilege does not mean immunity from judgment; rather, it means a higher accountability.

Outline

Commentary

Isaiah 5:8-10

The first woe is aimed at the real estate tycoons, the men who add house to house and join field to field. The sin here is not property ownership, which the Bible protects, but a rapacious greed that violates the spirit and letter of God's law concerning the land. The land was a gift from God, and the Jubilee laws were designed to prevent the creation of a permanent landed aristocracy and a permanent underclass. These men were gobbling up the inheritance of their brothers, centralizing wealth and power, until there was no room for anyone else. They wanted to live alone, as feudal lords in the midst of the land God had given to all the tribes. The judgment is therefore perfectly tailored to the sin. God swears that their great houses will become desolate, uninhabited. The very land they coveted will lose its fruitfulness. Ten acres of prime vineyard will produce a mere bath of wine, a pittance. A homer of seed, a massive amount, will yield only an ephah of grain, a tenth of the seed sown. When men grasp for everything, God ensures they end up with nothing. Economic judgment follows economic sin.

Isaiah 5:11-12

The second woe is against the party animals, the dissipated hedonists. These are the men who get up early, not to work, but to pursue strong drink. Their days are bookended by intoxication, from morning until late at night when wine inflames them. Their life is one long banquet, filled with the finest music. But in the midst of all their manufactured merriment, there is a catastrophic spiritual blindness. They do not look upon the deeds of Yahweh, nor do they see the work of His hands. They are so consumed with their own appetites and distractions that they are oblivious to the God who is ruling and acting in the world all around them. This is a picture of a culture drowning itself in trivialities to avoid the weight of glory, or the terror of judgment. They are willfully ignorant, anesthetizing themselves against reality.

Isaiah 5:13-17

Therefore. This word connects the preceding sins to the coming judgment. Because of this willful ignorance, this lack of knowledge, God's people go into exile. Their best men, their honorable men, will starve, and the masses will be parched with thirst. The punishment fits the crime. A people who live for the banquet will be judged with famine and thirst. Sheol, the grave, is personified as a ravenous beast, enlarging its throat and opening its mouth to swallow the whole noisy, exultant, majestic city. All classes of men, from the common man to the man of importance, will be brought low. In this great humbling, God alone will be exalted. Yahweh of hosts will be lofty in judgment. And in the aftermath, there will be a great reversal. The fields of the wealthy, now laid waste, will become pasture for lambs, and sojourners, the very people displaced by the greedy, will eat among the ruins. God's justice is always restorative.

Isaiah 5:18-19

The third woe is leveled against those who sin with open defiance. They don't just stumble into sin; they harness themselves to it. They drag iniquity with the cords of worthlessness, and sin as if with cart ropes. Sin is their beast of burden, and they are yoked to it, pulling it along proudly. This brazen attitude extends to their view of God. They mock the idea of divine judgment, taunting the prophet and, by extension, God Himself. Let Him hurry, let Him hasten His work, that we may see it. This is the cynical sneer of the unbeliever who mistakes God's patience for impotence. They dare the Holy One of Israel to show up, confident that He will not. This is a high-handed sin, and it stores up wrath for the day of wrath.

Isaiah 5:20

Here we come to the philosophical heart of Judah's rebellion. This is perhaps the most famous and most terrifying of the woes. Woe to those who call evil good and good evil. This is not simple confusion. This is a deliberate, malicious inversion of the moral order. It is the work of those who substitute darkness for light and light for darkness. When a society rejects God's revealed law as the standard for righteousness, it does not enter a state of neutral liberty. It immediately begins the project of building an anti-law, a satanic inversion of God's reality. What God calls an abomination, they call a civil right. What God calls righteous, they call bigotry. This is the final stage of apostasy, where the conscience has been so seared that it now applauds wickedness and condemns virtue. This is the defining characteristic of our own secular age.

Isaiah 5:21

This woe is the necessary foundation for the previous one. How does a man get to the point of calling evil good? By becoming wise in his own eyes and understanding in his own sight. This is the sin of intellectual pride, the original sin of the Garden. It is the rejection of revelation in favor of autonomous human reason. Man appoints himself as the ultimate arbiter of truth and morals. He leans on his own understanding, and the result is that he becomes a fool, capable of believing and celebrating the most grotesque lies. The academic, the expert, and the technocrat who believe they can engineer a better world without reference to the Creator are the modern embodiment of this woe.

Isaiah 5:22-23

The final woe brings us back to the practical outworking of all this pride and moral confusion in the realm of civil justice. The leaders are mighty, but mighty in drinking wine. They are valiant, but valiant in mixing strong drink. Their prowess is spent on dissipation, not on justice. And the inevitable result is corruption. They declare the wicked righteous for a bribe, and remove the righteous standing of the ones who are righteous. The courts, which are meant to be a reflection of God's own judgment, become a marketplace where justice is for sale. When the leaders are drunk on both wine and their own self-importance, the foundations of the society are destroyed.

Isaiah 5:24-30

Therefore. Again, the verdict is tied directly to the evidence presented. Because of all these things, judgment will be like a fire consuming stubble. It will be swift and total. Their root, their hidden foundation, will be rot, and their blossom, their public glory, will blow away like dust. And the reason is stated plainly: For they have rejected the law of Yahweh of hosts. This is the taproot of all their other sins. God's anger is not arbitrary; it is a holy and just response to their covenant infidelity. His hand is stretched out against them, and the judgment is so severe that even the mountains tremble. And yet, it is not enough to turn back His anger. His hand is still stretched out. He will whistle for a distant nation, the Assyrians, to come and act as His rod of judgment. God is sovereign over the affairs of all nations, and He will use even pagan armies to discipline His people. The description of this invading army is terrifying. They are swift, tireless, and perfectly equipped. They are like a lion, and there is no one to deliver the prey. The final image is one of complete despair. When one looks to the land, there is only darkness and distress. The light they thought they had, the light of their own wisdom, has been extinguished. This is what happens when a people rejects the Word of the Holy One of Israel.

Application

The woes of Isaiah 5 are not a historical curiosity. They are a mirror held up to our own Western cultures. We are a society that adds house to house, drowning in materialism while our communities disintegrate. We are a people who rise early to pursue our digital distractions, willfully ignorant of the works of God. We are a people who brazenly mock the standards of Scripture and dare God to do something about it. And most centrally, we are a people who call evil good and good evil, celebrating what God condemns and condemning what He commands. We are wise in our own eyes, and our halls of justice are increasingly corrupt.

The warning, therefore, is for us. A people who reject the law of the Lord will eventually be consumed by the consequences. The only hope is the one Isaiah will later proclaim so clearly. The hope is in the coming King, the Messiah, who would take the full force of God's righteous anger upon Himself. He is the one who drank the cup of God's wrath so that we, a people guilty of every one of these woes, might be forgiven. The application for the church is to repent of our compromise with the spirit of the age, to call good good and evil evil without flinching, and to proclaim the lordship of Jesus Christ, who is the only hope for a world darkened by its own clouds.