Isaiah 5
Isaiah steps forward not as a preacher but as a singer. Now will I sing to my wellbeloved a song of my beloved touching his vineyard (v. 1). It begins like a tender ballad, a song sung on behalf of a friend about the vineyard he loves. And the friend has spared nothing. He chose a very fruitful hill, fenced it, gathered out the stones, planted it with the choicest vine, built a watchtower in the middle, and cut a winepress into the rock - every act the work of a careful, hopeful vinedresser who fully expects a harvest. Then the song breaks: he looked that it should bring forth grapes, and it brought forth wild grapes (v. 2). The disappointment is total. Everything was done; nothing good came of it.3
The singer turns to the listeners and asks them to be the jury: judge, I pray you, betwixt me and my vineyard (v. 3). Then comes the question with no good answer, What could have been done more to my vineyard, that I have not done in it? (v. 4), and the sentence: the hedge will come down, the wall will be broken, the ground left to briers and thorns, the rain withheld (vv. 5-6). Only in verse 7 does the song name what it has been singing about all along, and the naming lands like a verdict: the vineyard of the LORD of hosts is the house of Israel, and the men of Judah his pleasant plant: and he looked for judgment, but behold oppression; for righteousness, but behold a cry.
What follows is the spelling-out of the wild grapes. Six times Isaiah cries Woe, and each woe names a particular rot: those who join house to house until the poor have no place (v. 8); those who chase strong drink from dawn to dark and never regard the work of the LORD (vv. 11-12); those who drag sin behind them with a cart rope and dare God to hurry (vv. 18-19); those who call evil good, and good evil (v. 20); those wise in their own eyes (v. 21); and those who justify the wicked for reward (vv. 22-23). The chapter closes with the LORD's hand still stretched out and a distant army summoned with a whistle, roaring like a lion over its prey - the very ruin the song foretold, now marching home.2
Tap any highlighted phrase to jump to the commentary that unpacks it.
Isaiah 5:1-7The Song of the Vineyard
1Now will I sing to my wellbeloved a song of my beloved touching his vineyard. My wellbeloved hath a vineyard in a very fruitful hill: 2And 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: and he looked that it should bring forth grapes, and it brought forth wild grapes. 3And now, O inhabitants of Jerusalem, and men of Judah, judge, I pray you, betwixt me and my vineyard. 4What could have been done more to my vineyard, that I have not done in it? wherefore, when I looked that it should bring forth grapes, brought it forth wild grapes?
The chapter opens as a song, and a love song at that: Now will I sing to my wellbeloved a song of my beloved touching his vineyard (v. 1). Isaiah sings as a friend of the bridegroom might sing on the bridegroom's behalf - warmly, intimately, about a vineyard that the Beloved cherishes. In the ancient world a vineyard was a natural figure for a bride or a treasured people, and the opening notes are all tenderness, not threat. Then comes the catalogue of care, and every item matters: he chose a very fruitful hill, the best possible ground; he fenced it, walling out the beasts and thieves; he gathered out the stones, the back-breaking labour of clearing a field by hand; he planted it with the choicest vine, sparing no expense on the stock; he built a tower in the midst of it, a permanent watchpost that says he means to guard this place for years; and he made a winepress therein, cutting a vat into the rock in full confidence that there will be a vintage to tread. Nothing a vinedresser could do was left undone. The whole verse leans forward toward one expected word - grapes.3
And then the song breaks on a single clause: he looked that it should bring forth grapes, and it brought forth wild grapes (v. 2). The verb looked carries the whole weight of expectation - the Beloved watched and waited, season after season, for the harvest his labour had earned. What came was wild grapes: not merely a poor crop but worthless, sour, rotten fruit, the kind of thing that grows on its own with no cultivation at all. After all that care, the vineyard produced what an untended thornpatch would have produced. So the singer turns and hands the case to the listeners themselves: O inhabitants of Jerusalem, and men of Judah, judge, I pray you, betwixt me and my vineyard (v. 3). It is the move of a courtroom - let the hearers render the verdict, not knowing yet that they are rendering it on themselves. Then comes the question that has no answer, asked with something close to grief: What could have been done more to my vineyard, that I have not done in it? (v. 4). Nothing could. The failure does not lie with the vinedresser. He did everything; the fruit was the vineyard's own.
5And now go to; I will tell you what I will do to my vineyard: I will take away the hedge thereof, and it shall be eaten up; and break down the wall thereof, and it shall be trodden down: 6And I will lay it waste: it shall not be pruned, nor digged; but there shall come up briers and thorns: I will also command the clouds that they rain no rain upon it. 7For the vineyard of the LORD of hosts is the house of Israel, and the men of Judah his pleasant plant: and he looked for judgment, but behold oppression; for righteousness, but behold a cry.
The vinedresser now says what he will do, and the sentence is simply the withdrawal of everything he had given: I will take away the hedge thereof… and break down the wall thereof… I will lay it waste: it shall not be pruned, nor digged; but there shall come up briers and thorns (vv. 5-6). Each act undoes a gift named earlier. The protective hedge that kept the beasts out comes down, so the vineyard is eaten up and trodden down. The cultivation stops - no pruning, no digging - so it reverts to briers and thorns, the very wildness the planting was meant to overcome. This is not so much an outside force destroying the vineyard as the Beloved stepping back and letting it become what it has insisted on being. And then the last and most striking line: I will also command the clouds that they rain no rain upon it. Only the owner of the rain could say that. The song has slipped its disguise. No mere vinedresser commands the clouds; the Beloved who has been speaking all along is the LORD Himself. The hearers, asked to judge the case, have been judging God's own dealings with His people - and have already, in their hearts, agreed that such a vineyard deserves its ruin.
Verse 7 strips away the parable and names everything: For the vineyard of the LORD of hosts is the house of Israel, and the men of Judah his pleasant plant. The vineyard is not a field; it is a people, the LORD's own - His pleasant plant, the planting He delighted in. And then the verdict lands with a precision that the English can only partly carry: he looked for judgment, but behold oppression; for righteousness, but behold a cry. The word translated judgment here is mishpat - justice, the right ordering of life together; what God found instead was mispach, bloodshed and oppression, a word that sounds almost exactly like the first, as if the right thing had curdled into its near-twin. He looked for tzedaqah, righteousness; what He heard was tze'aqah, the outcry of the wronged, again only a syllable away. The whole tragedy of the vineyard is compressed into two near-rhymes that fall just short: God asked for justice and got something that looked like it, sounded like it, and was its opposite. This is the harvest of wild grapes named at last. The fruit the LORD sought was not religious display but a people who did right by one another; what grew instead was cruelty wearing justice's clothes.1
Isaiah 5:8-17Woe to Them That Join House to House
8Woe unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field, till there be no place, that they may be placed alone in the midst of the earth! 9In mine ears said the LORD of hosts, Of a truth many houses shall be desolate, even great and fair, without inhabitant. 10Yea, ten acres of vineyard shall yield one bath, and the seed of an homer shall yield an ephah. 11Woe unto them that rise up early in the morning, that they may follow strong drink; that continue until night, till wine inflame them! 12And the harp, and the viol, the tabret, and pipe, and wine, are in their feasts: but they regard not the work of the LORD, neither consider the operation of his hands.
The song is over; now the wild grapes are named one by one, each introduced by the funeral cry Woe. The first targets the land-grabbers: Woe unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field, till there be no place, that they may be placed alone in the midst of the earth! (v. 8). The picture is of the wealthy steadily swallowing the land - buying out the small farmer, foreclosing on the family plot, knocking one field into the next - until the poor have nowhere left and the rich man stands alone, sole owner of a depopulated countryside. In Israel this was not merely unkind; it was a direct assault on the order God had built, in which the land was apportioned to families and was never meant to be permanently bought up by a few. The judgment fits the crime exactly: many houses shall be desolate, even great and fair, without inhabitant (v. 9). The grand houses they amassed will stand empty. And the fields they hoarded will betray them: ten acres of vineyard shall yield one bath - a tiny fraction of the harvest expected - and the seed of an homer shall yield an ephah (v. 10), the ground giving back a tenth of what was sown. They wanted all the land; they will reap almost nothing from it. This is the first wild grape: a hunger to possess that crowds out every neighbor.3
The second woe names a different rot - not grasping but numbing: Woe unto them that rise up early in the morning, that they may follow strong drink; that continue until night, till wine inflame them! (v. 11). The detail is damning. These are people who get up early not to work but to start drinking, and who keep at it until night, until the wine has them in its grip. Their days have no other shape than the next round. And Isaiah shows their whole world: the harp, and the viol, the tabret, and pipe, and wine, are in their feasts (v. 12) - an endless party, music and drink without pause. The problem is not the music or even the wine in itself; it is the last clause: but they regard not the work of the LORD, neither consider the operation of his hands. Here is the heart of the indictment. So absorbed are they in pleasure that they have gone blind to God entirely. They cannot see His hand in their own history, cannot read the warnings written across their times, cannot perceive what He is doing right in front of them. The festivity is not the sin so much as the symptom: a life so devoted to its own amusement that it has stopped noticing God altogether. That blindness has a cost, named at once.
13Therefore my people are gone into captivity, because they have no knowledge: and their honourable men are famished, and their multitude dried up with thirst. 14Therefore hell hath enlarged herself, and opened her mouth without measure: and their glory, and their multitude, and their pomp, and he that rejoiceth, shall descend into it. 15And the mean man shall be brought down, and the mighty man shall be humbled, and the eyes of the lofty shall be humbled: 16But the LORD of hosts shall be exalted in judgment, and God that is holy shall be sanctified in righteousness. 17Then shall the lambs feed after their manner, and the waste places of the fat ones shall strangers eat.
The first therefore draws the line straight from the partying to the exile: Therefore my people are gone into captivity, because they have no knowledge (v. 13). The phrase is heavy with sorrow - my people, the LORD still claims them even as He hands them over. Their ruin is rooted in a willed ignorance: those who refused to regard the work of the LORD are now a people with no knowledge, undone not by lack of intelligence but by lack of the one knowledge that matters. The feasters who were always full will be famished; the revelers swimming in wine will be dried up with thirst. Then the imagery turns vast and grim: hell hath enlarged herself, and opened her mouth without measure (v. 14) - the grave widening its jaws to swallow glory and multitude and pomp and the laughing reveler alike. Death makes no distinction between the great and the small; high and low go down together. The whole movement of these verses is a great leveling: the mean man shall be brought down, and the mighty man shall be humbled, and the eyes of the lofty shall be humbled (v. 15). Every proud thing that lifted itself up - the hoarded estate, the endless feast, the swaggering self-importance - is brought low at a stroke.
In the middle of the leveling stands a single soaring verse, the high point of the whole chapter: But the LORD of hosts shall be exalted in judgment, and God that is holy shall be sanctified in righteousness (v. 16). Notice the reversal it works. Everything human has just been humbled and brought down - and precisely in that lowering, the LORD is lifted up. His very act of judgment is what reveals His height. And the words are weighed with care: He is exalted in judgment and sanctified in righteousness - the same two words, judgment and righteousness, that the vineyard failed to produce back in verse 7. What Israel would not grow, God Himself supplies. The justice and righteousness missing from the vineyard are found, in the end, in the character of the Vinedresser. When His people will not be righteous, He shows Himself righteous in setting things right. So the judgment is not a failure of God's plan but a display of who He is - the Holy One, vindicated. And a small, almost gentle picture follows: then shall the lambs feed after their manner (v. 17), grazing peacefully on the ruined estates of the rich. Where proud men once hoarded fields, quiet flocks will pasture. The meek inherit the ground the mighty lost.
Isaiah 5:18-24Woe to Them That Call Evil Good
18Woe unto them that draw iniquity with cords of vanity, and sin as it were with a cart rope: 19That say, Let him make speed, and hasten his work, that we may see it: and let the counsel of the Holy One of Israel draw nigh and come, that we may know it! 20Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter! 21Woe unto them that are wise in their own eyes, and prudent in their own sight!
The third woe gives sin a strange and memorable shape: Woe unto them that draw iniquity with cords of vanity, and sin as it were with a cart rope (v. 18). The image is of people harnessed to their own wrongdoing, hauling it along behind them as an ox drags a loaded cart by thick ropes. They are not stumbling into sin; they are pulling it, leaning into the harness, working to drag it after them. And the ropes are cords of vanity - ropes of emptiness, of lies. What binds them to their sin is falsehood, the flattering untruths they tell themselves to keep going. There is something almost absurd in the picture: people straining and sweating to drag along the very thing that will crush them. Then the fourth woe exposes their inner contempt: That say, Let him make speed, and hasten his work, that we may see it: and let the counsel of the Holy One of Israel draw nigh and come, that we may know it! (v. 19). This is mockery dressed as a dare. They have heard the prophets warn of God's coming judgment, and they sneer - let Him hurry up, then; let us see this judgment of His; let the plans of the Holy One get here so we can have a look. They taunt God to act because they are certain He never will. It is the scoffer's creed: treat the warning as a joke precisely because you have decided in advance it is empty.
And now comes the woe that names the disease beneath all the others: Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter! (v. 20). This is the deepest corruption a society can reach, and the most dangerous, because it attacks the very faculty by which wrong is recognized. The earlier woes named bad deeds - hoarding, drinking, scoffing. This one names a bad conscience: the deliberate switching of the labels themselves, so that what is evil is praised as good and what is good is condemned as evil. Notice the three pairs Isaiah reaches for - good and evil, light and darkness, sweet and bitter. They move from the moral to the perceptual to the visceral, as if to say the rot has gone all the way down, past judgment into instinct, until people no longer even taste the difference. A culture can survive a great deal of plain wrongdoing while it still knows the wrong is wrong. What it cannot survive is the loss of the distinction itself, the moment it begins to celebrate as enlightened the very things that are destroying it. And the root of that inversion is named in the next breath: Woe unto them that are wise in their own eyes, and prudent in their own sight! (v. 21). The relabeling begins in pride - in people so sure of their own cleverness that they have set themselves up as the measure of good and evil, and no longer answer to anything above their own opinion.
22Woe unto them that are mighty to drink wine, and men of strength to mingle strong drink: 23Which justify the wicked for reward, and take away the righteousness of the righteous from him! 24Therefore as the fire devoureth the stubble, and the flame consumeth the chaff, so their root shall be as rottenness, and their blossom shall go up as dust: because they have cast away the law of the LORD of hosts, and despised the word of the Holy One of Israel.
The sixth and last woe joins two things that at first seem unrelated, and the joining is the point: Woe unto them that are mighty to drink wine, and men of strength to mingle strong drink: which justify the wicked for reward, and take away the righteousness of the righteous from him! (vv. 22-23). Here are men celebrated for their strength - but their only feat is holding their drink, heroes at the bottle and nowhere else. And the same men sit as judges. Drink has hollowed out their integrity, and so in court they justify the wicked for reward, acquitting the guilty who can pay, and take away the righteousness of the righteous, robbing the innocent of the verdict they deserve. The inversion of verse 20 has reached the bench: in the place where justice should be most carefully guarded, evil is called good for a bribe. This is the final wild grape, and it loops the chapter back to its beginning - the oppression and the cry of verse 7 have a courtroom now. Then the sentence falls, swift as fire: as the fire devoureth the stubble, and the flame consumeth the chaff, so their root shall be as rottenness, and their blossom shall go up as dust (v. 24). They will burn root and branch, leaving neither foundation nor flower. And Isaiah names the one offense that gathers up all six woes: because they have cast away the law of the LORD of hosts, and despised the word of the Holy One of Israel. Every wild grape traces back to this - a people who threw away God's word and held His holiness in contempt.
Isaiah 5:25-30His Hand Is Stretched Out Still
25Therefore is the anger of the LORD kindled against his people, and he hath stretched forth his hand against them, and hath smitten them: and the hills did tremble, and their carcases were torn in the midst of the streets. For all this his anger is not turned away, but his hand is stretched out still. 26And he will lift up an ensign to the nations from far, and will hiss unto them from the end of the earth: and, behold, they shall come with speed swiftly: 27None shall be weary nor stumble among them; none shall slumber nor sleep; neither shall the girdle of their loins be loosed, nor the latchet of their shoes be broken:
The woes give way to the sentence carried out: Therefore is the anger of the LORD kindled against his people, and he hath stretched forth his hand against them, and hath smitten them: and the hills did tremble, and their carcases were torn in the midst of the streets (v. 25). The God who stretched out His hand at the Red Sea to save now stretches it out in judgment; the hills shake at His touch, and the dead lie unburied in the open streets - a horror, in a culture that honored its dead above almost all else. But the most chilling words come at the verse's end: For all this his anger is not turned away, but his hand is stretched out still. The blow has fallen, and it is not finished. The hand that struck remains raised. This solemn refrain - his hand is stretched out still - will toll again and again through the chapters ahead, like a bell that will not stop, marking a judgment that keeps coming because the people will not turn. And yet there is a strange restraint hidden in it. A hand stretched out still is a hand not yet brought all the way down. The very phrase that warns of more to come also says the end has not yet arrived - that there is still, even now, a space in which a people might turn back before the hand falls finally. Judgment delayed is judgment that still leaves a door.3
Isaiah now shows the instrument of that outstretched hand - and it is terrifyingly ordinary: a foreign army. He will lift up an ensign to the nations from far, and will hiss unto them from the end of the earth: and, behold, they shall come with speed swiftly (v. 26). The LORD raises a banner like a signal flag and hisses - whistles - for the distant nations the way a beekeeper whistles to call the swarm, and they come running at His summons. This is the chapter's sovereignty laid bare: the empires that will trample Israel are not acting on their own; they are bees called by God's own whistle, instruments in the hand still stretched out. And what a force answers the call: None shall be weary nor stumble among them; none shall slumber nor sleep; neither shall the girdle of their loins be loosed, nor the latchet of their shoes be broken (v. 27). It is a portrait of a perfect, tireless war machine - soldiers who never flag, never doze, never so much as loosen a belt or snap a sandal strap on the long march. Everything is ready; nothing fails. The contrast with the drowsy, drunken feasters of verse 11, who could barely rise from their couches, is total. Against a people too sodden to notice God's work comes an army too disciplined to falter. The judgment marches with the precision the vineyard refused to grow.
28Whose arrows are sharp, and all their bows bent, their horses' hoofs shall be counted like flint, and their wheels like a whirlwind: 29Their roaring shall be like a lion, they shall roar like young lions: yea, they shall roar, and lay hold of the prey, and shall carry it away safe, and none shall deliver it. 30And in that day they shall roar against them like the roaring of the sea: and if one look unto the land, behold darkness and sorrow, and the light is darkened in the heavens thereof.
The closing verses let the army arrive in a rush of sound and speed. Whose arrows are sharp, and all their bows bent, their horses' hoofs shall be counted like flint, and their wheels like a whirlwind (v. 28) - weapons honed, bows already drawn, hooves striking sparks like flint, chariot wheels spinning like a dust-storm. And then the sound becomes that of a beast: Their roaring shall be like a lion, they shall roar like young lions: yea, they shall roar, and lay hold of the prey, and shall carry it away safe, and none shall deliver it (v. 29). The vineyard image is gone; now Israel is prey in a lion's jaws, dragged off with no rescuer in sight - none shall deliver. The chapter that opened with a love song ends with a roar. And the last verse darkens everything: in that day they shall roar against them like the roaring of the sea: and if one look unto the land, behold darkness and sorrow, and the light is darkened in the heavens thereof (v. 30). The roar swells to the sound of the sea, that ancient picture of chaos overwhelming order; and when a survivor lifts his eyes to the land, there is only darkness and sorrow, the very light blotted out of the sky. It is a deliberate, terrible echo of the woe in verse 20: those who put darkness for light are left, at the end, with the light itself put out. They called the darkness good; now darkness is all they have. The chapter closes in that gloom - but it is not Isaiah's last word, for the very next chapter opens with a throne, a temple, and a cry of Holy, holy, holy, and a prophet sent with a coal from the altar. The darkness here is real; it is not, in the book's larger song, final.
Further study
- The Hebrew text of Isaiah 5 with Rashi, Ibn Ezra, and other classical commentators side by side - useful for the rare word be'ushim (v. 2, the “wild grapes,” literally stinking or rotten things) and for the famous sound-play of verse 7, where mishpat (judgment) is answered by mispach (oppression) and tzedaqah (righteousness) by tze'aqah (a cry).
- Isaiah 5 ↔ Matthew 21 · John 15 · Psalm 80Intertextual BibleTraces the threads tying Isaiah 5 to the rest of Scripture - the vineyard of verses 1-7 read alongside the vine of Psalm 80, Jesus' parable of the wicked husbandmen that deliberately reuses its words (Matt. 21:33-43), and His claim to be the true vine (John 15:1) bearing the fruit the old vineyard could not.
- Isaiah 5 - Translators' NotesNET BibleThe NET Bible's detailed footnotes on Isaiah 5 - the agricultural vocabulary of the vineyard's preparation (vv. 1-2), the wordplay that gives verse 7 its sting, the social crimes behind each woe, and the imagery of the far nation summoned in verses 26-30.
Where this echoes in Scripture
The Song of the Vineyard
- Psalm 80:8-11Thou hast brought a vine out of Egypt: thou hast cast out the heathen, and planted it... and it filled the land.The same figure as verses 1-2 - Israel as the vine the LORD planted and tended with His own hand.
- Matthew 21:33-43There was a certain householder, which planted a vineyard, and hedged it round about, and digged a winepress in it, and built a tower.Jesus retells Isaiah’s song word for word (v. 2), and carries it to the killing of the owner’s son.
- John 15:1-5I am the true vine, and my Father is the husbandman... He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit.The vineyard that failed answered at last - the true Vine who bears the fruit Israel’s vineyard could not (vv. 2, 7).
- Jeremiah 2:21Yet I had planted thee a noble vine, wholly a right seed: how then art thou turned into the degenerate plant of a strange vine unto me?The same grief as verse 2 - a choice vine planted by God, gone wild against all expectation.
- Micah 6:8and what doth the LORD require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?The fruit the LORD looked for in verse 7 - justice and righteousness, not ritual.
Woe to Them That Join House to House
- Micah 2:1-2they covet fields, and take them by violence; and houses, and take them away: so they oppress a man and his house.The same crime as verse 8 - the powerful seizing field and house until the poor have no place.
- Luke 12:19-20Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years; take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry. But God said unto him, Thou fool.The feasting blindness of verses 11-12 - a life of ease that never reckoned with God.
- Isaiah 2:11The lofty looks of man shall be humbled, and the haughtiness of men shall be bowed down, and the LORD alone shall be exalted in that day.The same leveling as verses 15-16 - the proud brought low, the LORD alone exalted.
- Romans 3:26that he might be just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus.The holy God sanctified in righteousness (v. 16) - shown just at the cross, where He justifies the believer.
- Habakkuk 2:5who enlargeth his desire as hell, and is as death, and cannot be satisfied.The widening grave of verse 14 - the appetite of death that swallows the proud without measure.
Woe to Them That Call Evil Good
- Amos 5:7Ye who turn judgment to wormwood, and leave off righteousness in the earth.The inversion of verse 20 in another prophet - justice itself turned bitter as wormwood.
- John 3:19men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil.The heart behind verse 20 - the preference for darkness over light when the deeds are evil.
- Proverbs 17:15He that justifieth the wicked, and he that condemneth the just, even they both are abomination to the LORD.The corrupt court of verses 22-23 - acquitting the guilty and condemning the innocent, an abomination.
- Romans 1:22Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools.The self-wisdom of verse 21 - the cleverness in one’s own eyes that collapses into folly.
- 1 John 1:5God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.The fixed standard verse 20 denies - the One in whom light and darkness can never be confused.
His Hand Is Stretched Out Still
- Isaiah 9:12For all this his anger is not turned away, but his hand is stretched out still.The same refrain as verse 25, tolling again - a bell that keeps sounding through Isaiah’s warnings.
- Isaiah 6:3Holy, holy, holy, is the LORD of hosts: the whole earth is full of his glory.The Holy One despised in this chapter (v. 24), seen enthroned in the very next - the dark is not the last word.
- Deuteronomy 28:49The LORD shall bring a nation against thee from far, from the end of the earth, as swift as the eagle flieth.The far nation summoned in verses 26-27 - the covenant warning of an army called from the ends of the earth.
- Amos 5:18-20the day of the LORD is darkness, and not light... even very dark, and no brightness in it.The darkened light of verse 30 - the day of judgment as deep darkness for those who longed for it carelessly.
- 1 Peter 5:8your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour.The roaring lion of verse 29 - the image of a devouring enemy from whom there is no self-rescue.