The stones in the vineyard

The Book of Isaiah belongs to the Hebrew Bible. Its fifth chapter preserves a song about a vineyard. The owner begins by choosing a good plot and putting work into it. Before a single grape appears, the listener has already watched someone dig, plant and build. In Martin Luther’s German rendering, heaps of stones help protect the vines. Other translations describe the grower removing stones. Here the English follows the German reading so the image under discussion is the same.

Making a place for the vines

He fenced it in, protected it with heaps of stones and planted choice vines in it. He also built a tower in it and dug a winepress there, and waited for it to bear grapes, but it bore wild grapes.

– Book of Isaiah, The Bible, 1922, p. 666.^[1]

Two choices come together. The owner attends to the boundary of the vineyard and selects what will grow inside it. A tower and a winepress follow. Someone who digs a press already has fruit in mind. Yet time lies between laying out the vineyard and its first harvest. Some of the labour remains visible in the landscape while nobody can yet say what the vines will bear.

What the owner expects

At first the song invites its audience to judge like neighbours who know the land. What more could the grower have done? In verse seven the vineyard finally receives a name. It stands for the house of Israel. The expected harvest acquires a more precise meaning as well. The owner had looked for justice and righteousness. The verse about the stones shows a concrete act of care. The rest of the song explains why so much attention was given to the preparations. What the owner gave the vineyard sets the measure of his disappointment in its fruit.