Isaiah 5:8-30·~1 min

Woes to the Wicked

The first woe falls on those who accumulate houses and fields until no one else can dwell in the land. The LORD answers their grasping ambition with desolation and barrenness, showing that acquisitive injustice ends not in abundance but in emptiness.

W⁸oe to you who add house to house ⁹I heard the LORD of Hosts declare: ¹⁰For ten acres of vineyard

The next woe targets those who devote themselves to drinking and feasting without regard for the work or majesty of the LORD. Therefore exile, hunger, thirst, death, and humiliation follow, while the LORD is exalted in justice and the emptied land becomes pasture for others.

¹¹Woe to those who rise early in the morning ¹²At their feasts are the lyre and harp, ¹³Therefore My people will go into exile ¹⁴Therefore Sheol enlarges its throat ¹⁵So mankind will be brought low, and each man humbled; ¹⁶But the LORD of Hosts will be exalted by His justice, ¹⁷Lambs will graze as in their own pastures,

Isaiah then pronounces woes on those who drag sin along proudly, mockingly demand that God act, call evil good and good evil, claim wisdom in their own eyes, and boast of skill in drinking while acquitting the guilty for bribes. These are not isolated vices but a whole moral order turned upside down.

¹⁸Woe to those who draw iniquity with cords of deceit ¹⁹to those who say, “Let Him hurry and hasten His work ²⁰Woe to those who call evil good ²¹Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes ²²Woe to those who are heroes in drinking wine ²³who acquit the guilty for a bribe

Because they have rejected the law of the LORD of Hosts and despised the word of the Holy One of Israel, their root will rot and their blossom blow away like dust. The LORD's anger burns against His people and He raises a distant nation whose disciplined, swift, lion-like power brings darkness, distress, and an inescapable roar over the land.

²⁴Therefore, as a tongue of fire consumes the straw, ²⁵Therefore the anger of the LORD burns against His people; ²⁶He lifts a banner for the distant nations ²⁷None of them grows weary or stumbles; ²⁸Their arrows are sharpened, ²⁹Their roaring is like that of a lion; ³⁰In that day they will roar over it,

Section summaryAfter the vineyard song, Isaiah pronounces repeated woes against the social and moral disorders that explain Judah's bad fruit: land-grabbing greed, revelry without regard for God's work, shameless attachment to sin, moral inversion, self-satisfied wisdom, drunken leadership, and bribery that denies justice. The section closes by tracing these sins to contempt for the LORD's law and by depicting a foreign force swiftly summoned to execute judgment upon the land.

Role in the chapterThis section details the specific forms of wickedness bringing Judah to ruin and ends with the advance of divinely appointed judgment.