A Series of Denunciations on Various Offenders. This section contains a collection of Woes, originally independent and even now not woven into a single symmetrical address. Whether they come from different periods of Isaiah's ministry is not so clear; no confidence can be felt in the attempts to date them. The text has not been very well preserved.
Isaiah 5:8-10. Woe to the grasping land-holders who drive the old possessors from their ancestral homesteads that they may have large estates all to themselves. Soon there will be a loneliness they will not desire, the solitude of desolation, and their lands will yield a harvest far less than the seed. With their land the dispossessed would lose their civil rights, to which the Hebrews hung tenaciously, as we see from the story of Naboth (1 Kings 21).
Isaiah 5:9. Read, therefore the Lord of hosts hath sworn in mine ears.
Isaiah 5:10. acres: literally yokes, a yoke being as much as two strong oxen could plough from morn till night. a bath: a liquid measure equivalent to an ephah of dry measure, about nine gallons of wine, a very small vintage from so large a vineyard. Since an ephah was the tenth part of a homer (Ezekiel 45:11), the harvest amounts to only a tenth of the seed.
Isaiah 5:11-17. In this section Isaiah 5:15 f. is probably a marginal quotation of Isaiah 2:11 made from memory. Isaiah 5:14 foretells utter destruction, a prophecy of humiliation is out of place; the woe is on revellers, these verses are a denunciation of pride. Isaiah 5:14; Isaiah 5:17 also do not properly follow Isaiah 5:13, which has announced the penalty; they seem to be the conclusion of another woe; in which a city had been denounced to which the pronoun her, incorrectly rendered their, must refer. Isaiah 5:11-13 is a Woe on the drunkards and revellers, who practise the disgraceful habit (Ecclesiastes 10:16 f., Acts 2:15) of drinking in the morning, and leave God out of their calculations. Blind to the signs of His working, they perish by captivity and famine. Isaiah 5:14; Isaiah 5:17 describe how the city, presumably Jerusalem, is swallowed by Sheol, the insatiable underworld (Proverbs 30:16; Habakkuk 2:5), depicted as a monster distending its mouth to devour her. Then the lambs pasture on its site, and the ruined mansions are the camping ground of nomads
Isaiah 5:13. Read, Their honourable men are exhausted (m e zeh) with famine.
Isaiah 5:17. We need a parallel to lambs in the second clause; read either, and the waste places shall fatlings eat: or and the waste places shall kids (g e daim) eat. In the first clause we should perhaps read feed in their desert place.
Isaiah 5:18-24. Woe to the scoffing free-thinkers who believe the Day of Yahweh will never come, and challenge God to do His worst. As beasts are yoked to a cart, so they yoke themselves to sin with strong cords of flippant frivolity, and drag with sin the punishment which comes in its train. Woe to the sophists who pervert the radical moral distinctions. Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes, i.e. the smart, self-satisfied politicians, who flout the counsel given by Yahweh through His prophet. Woe to the drunkards, heroes not for the fray but the debauch, with the strong head of the hard drinker. Not content with ordinary wine, they mix spices with it to enhance its flavour and increase its strength. Woe to those who take bribes to acquit the guilty and condemn the innocent. They shall be like stubble consumed by the flame and a plant with rotting root and blossom turned to dust. Isaiah 5:23 does not follow naturally on Isaiah 5:22.