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Japanese Isaiah gives the answer in one line: “the vineyard of the LORD of hosts is the house of Israel” (Isaiah 5:7). A vineyard in the Bible is God’s people, planted and tended by him, and he looks to it for fruit. Jesus took up the picture in his parables, and called himself “the true vine” (John 15:1).
A few lines earlier the owner of that vineyard asks a question no one can answer: “What could have been done more to my vineyard, that I have not done in it?” (Isaiah 5:4). He has given everything. Most of the vineyards in Scripture, from Isaiah’s song to Jesus’ parables, show us that care.
What is a vineyard in the Bible?
A vineyard is a field planted with grapevines, and the Bible describes one exactly. Isaiah’s owner has “a vineyard in a very fruitful hill: And he fenced it, and gathered out the stones thereof, and planted it with the choicest vine, and built a tower in the midst of it, and also made a winepress therein” (Isaiah 5:1–2). The hedge kept out passers-by and wild animals, which Psalm 80 pictures plucking and wasting a vine whose hedges are broken down (Psalm 80:12–13). The tower was a place to keep watch, and the winepress was where the harvest was trodden. Jesus describes the same kind of vineyard, with its hedge, winepress and tower, at the start of one of his parables (Matthew 21:33).
The first vineyard in Scripture is Noah’s. After the flood, “Noah began to be an husbandman, and he planted a vineyard” (Genesis 9:20). In the King James Bible “vineyard” and “vineyards” come 114 times, and “vine” and “vines” 74 times. Again and again, when the Bible speaks of either, it is also speaking of us.
Why is Israel called God’s vineyard?
Because God planted Israel, as a man plants a vine. Psalm 80 tells the story of the exodus that way: “Thou hast brought a vine out of Egypt: thou hast cast out the heathen, and planted it. Thou preparedst room before it, and didst cause it to take deep root, and it filled the land” (Psalm 80:8–9). Jeremiah hears God say, “Yet I had planted thee a noble vine, wholly a right seed” (Jeremiah 2:21).
Isaiah’s song of the vineyard begins as a love song, “a song of my beloved touching his vineyard” (Isaiah 5:1), and turns into a lament. The owner did everything, “and he looked that it should bring forth grapes, and it brought forth wild grapes” (Isaiah 5:2). Then the prophet names the fruit God was looking for: “he looked for judgment, but behold oppression; for righteousness, but behold a cry” (Isaiah 5:7). The grapes God wants from his vineyard are justice and right living, and the wild grapes are the cry of people who have been wronged. So the hedge is taken away and the vineyard laid waste, and God even commands “the clouds that they rain no rain upon it” (Isaiah 5:6).
That is not the last song. In Isaiah 27 the vineyard is sung over again, and God speaks of it with tenderness: “A vineyard of red wine. I the LORD do keep it; I will water it every moment: lest any hurt it, I will keep it night and day” (Isaiah 27:2–3). And when Psalm 80 sees the vine broken down and burned, it does what we can always do. It prays: “Return, we beseech thee, O God of hosts: look down from heaven, and behold, and visit this vine” (Psalm 80:14).
What do Jesus’ parables of the vineyard mean?
Jesus told several, and his hearers would have heard Isaiah’s song in them. The sharpest is the parable of the wicked tenants. A householder plants a vineyard, hedges it, digs a winepress, builds a tower, rents it out to farmers and goes into a far country. When harvest comes he sends servants for the fruit, and the farmers beat one, kill another and stone another. “But last of all he sent unto them his son, saying, They will reverence my son” (Matthew 21:37). They kill the son too. Jesus ends by quoting the psalm of the rejected stone and giving a warning: “The kingdom of God shall be taken from you, and given to a nation bringing forth the fruits thereof” (Matthew 21:43). The chief priests and Pharisees “perceived that he spake of them” (Matthew 21:45).
Here the owner’s question from Isaiah is answered. What more could he do for his vineyard? He could send his son. God, who had sent prophet after prophet, at last sent his own Son, and the Son was cast out of the vineyard and killed (Matthew 21:39). That is the measure of his care for the people he planted.
The other vineyard parables show the same owner from other sides. In the parable of the labourers, he goes out at dawn, at the third, sixth and ninth hours, and even at the eleventh hour, to hire workers, and pays the last as much as the first. When the early workers complain, he answers, “Is it not lawful for me to do what I will with mine own? Is thine eye evil, because I am good?” (Matthew 20:15). In the parable of the two sons, one says “I will not” and then goes to the vineyard, and the other says “I go, sir” and never does. Asked which did his father’s will, the listeners answer, “The first,” and Jesus tells them that “the publicans and the harlots go into the kingdom of God before you” (Matthew 21:31). The yes that counts is the one we live. And in Luke, a fig tree in a vineyard has borne nothing for three years. The owner says to cut it down, and the vinedresser pleads, “Lord, let it alone this year also, till I shall dig about it, and dung it” (Luke 13:8). God is patient with his vineyard, and generous to everyone who comes to work in it, however late.
What does “I am the true vine” mean?
On his last night with his disciples, Jesus told them, “I am the true vine, and my Father is the husbandman” (John 15:1). For centuries Israel had been called God’s vine, and the vine had so often failed to bear. Now Jesus says that he himself is the vine, the true one, and that his followers live as branches in him: “I am the vine, ye are the branches: He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit: for without me ye can do nothing” (John 15:5).
The Father is still the gardener, and he still prunes. “Every branch in me that beareth not fruit he taketh away: and every branch that beareth fruit, he purgeth it, that it may bring forth more fruit” (John 15:2). Pruning hurts the vine and makes it fruitful. The fruit he looks for is the fruit Isaiah named, a life of righteousness that comes from staying close to him, and many of the verses on it are gathered in Bible verses about bearing fruit. “Herein is my Father glorified,” Jesus says, “that ye bear much fruit” (John 15:8).
The Catholic Church keeps both pictures together. Its Catechism, quoting the Second Vatican Council, says: “The Church is a cultivated field, the tillage of God… That land, like a choice vineyard, has been planted by the heavenly cultivator. Yet the true vine is Christ who gives life and fruitfulness to the branches” (paragraph 755). Paul says it in the language of the farm: “I have planted, Apollos watered; but God gave the increase… ye are God’s husbandry” (1 Corinthians 3:6, 9).
How did vineyards shape everyday life in Israel?
A vineyard could be a family’s inheritance, handed down from its fathers. When King Ahab wanted Naboth’s vineyard for a vegetable garden, Naboth would not sell it. He answered, “The LORD forbid it me, that I should give the inheritance of my fathers unto thee” (1 Kings 21:3), and it cost him his life: false witnesses were brought, and Naboth was stoned (1 Kings 21:13). The law also kept the vineyard open to the poor. “Thou shalt not glean thy vineyard, neither shalt thou gather every grape of thy vineyard; thou shalt leave them for the poor and stranger” (Leviticus 19:10). The grapes left on the vine were meant “for the stranger, for the fatherless, and for the widow” (Deuteronomy 24:21).
Planting a vineyard meant waiting to enjoy it. The law even sent home from battle the man who “hath planted a vineyard, and hath not yet eaten of it” (Deuteronomy 20:6). So the prophets’ pictures of a restored people are full of vineyards. “They shall plant vineyards, and drink the wine thereof,” says Amos (Amos 9:14), and Micah sees a day when “they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree; and none shall make them afraid” (Micah 4:4). In the Song of Songs the vineyard becomes the picture of love and of one’s own life: “mine own vineyard have I not kept” (Song of Solomon 1:6), and “Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines: for our vines have tender grapes” (Song of Solomon 2:15).
The fruit of the vineyard has its own story, from the cluster the spies carried out of Canaan to the winepress of Revelation, told in what grapes symbolize in the Bible.
We are the vineyard God planted and the branches of the vine he sent. When our lives bear more wild grapes than good ones, we can still pray Psalm 80, and the gardener is still at work among us. What the true vine asks of us is simple enough to say every morning: “Abide in me, and I in you” (John 15:4).
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