Now will I sing to my well-beloved a song— The third prophetic discourse is contained in this chapter; which, being partly parabolical, and partly proper, naturally divides itself into two principal parts. The first contains the parable, Isaiah 5:1-6 the other the explanation of the parable, Isaiah 5:7-30. In the former part we have, first, the exordium, placed as a kind of title before the song, in part of the first verse; then the parable itself, Isaiah 5:1-6 in which the chosen nation, Israel, is compared to a vine: and this also is threefold. The state and attributes of this mystical vine is first described, Isaiah 5:1-2 then the consequence of that state is set forth, its unfruitfulness; thirdly, the divine judgment concerning it, after the preceding conviction, Isaiah 5:3-6. The exposition of the parable contains, 1st, its interpretation, Isaiah 5:7. 2nd, a twofold declaration, in which six grievous crimes of the Jewish people are enumerated, with a woe prefixed to them, Isaiah 5:8-23 and the sentence of God is declared concerning the punishment to be inflicted on these ungrateful covenant-breakers, Isaiah 5:24-30. If the destruction of the Jewish polity by the Chaldeans be primarily meant, the total destruction of that polity under the Romans seems secondarily and more emphatically foretold. It is supposed that Isaiah delivered this prophesy at the end of the reign of Uzziah. See Micah 3:12.Matthew 21:41.Luke 20:16.
My well-beloved hath a vineyard in a very fruitful hill— The author of the Observations remarks, that the land of Israel is here called by the prophet, (as we have it in the margin of our Bibles) a vineyard in the horn of the son of oil. Vitringa seems to suppose, that it is so represented on account of its height; and such seems to have been the opinion of our translators in rendering it, a vineyard in a very fruitful hill. Hills are undoubtedly the most proper places for planting vineyards; and God might justly upbraid Israel with the goodness of the country in which he had placed them, its mountains themselves being very fertile: but, if that was the sole intention, is it not somewhat strange that the prophet should on this occasion use an expression so extremely figurative? especially as the same prophet elsewhere often speaks of the hills with simplicity. I will not deny, that it is agreeable enough to the eastern style to express a hill by the term horn; for the supposition of Bishop Pococke seems to be by no means unnatural, who tells us, that there is a low mountain in Galilee, which has both its ends raised up in such a manner as to look like two mounts, which are called the horn of Hutin, and, as he thinks, from this circumstance, the village of Hutin being underneath it. But then it is to be remembered, that the term horn may equally at least be understood in a different sense. So Sir John Chardin informs us, that a long strip of land, which runs out into the Caspian sea, is called the middle-sized horn; and D'Herbelot tells us, that the place where one of the branches of the Euphrates falls into the Tygris is called the horn. By the horn then of the son of oil, the prophet might mean Syria, which is bordered on one side by the sea, and on the other by the most barren desart, and stretches out from its base to the south like a horn; and so these words will be a geographical description of Judaea of the poetic kind; representing it as seated in particular in the fertile country of Syria, rather than in a general and indeterminate way, as situated in a fertile hill. The propriety of describing Syria as a country of oil, no one will, I suppose, contest, as we find that oil was wont anciently to be carried from thence to Egypt; (Hosea 12:1.) and as we find the celebrated croisade historian, William of Tyre, describing Syria Sobal, as all thickly set with olive trees, so as to make prodigious woods, which covered the whole country, affording its inhabitants in those times, as they did their predecessors, a livelihood, and the destruction of which must have been their ruin.