A Song of a Vineyard

During the period of the prophetic oracles of First Isaiah (c.740–700 BCE) including the one recorded in Isaiah 5, the Assyrians carted away exiles from Israel’s Northern Kingdom. The fall of Samaria took upwards of twenty years to complete, beginning under Tiglath-Pileser III (c.745–27 BCE), and finished off by Assyrian Kings Sargon II (c. 722–05 BCE) and Sennacherib (705–681 BCE).

The British Museum in London houses a classic example of contested history in its preservation of a gypsum wall relief that documents, from the Assyrian perspective, the Northern Kingdom’s fateful end. With victorious horses and chariots arrayed before him, the enthroned Assyrian king, whose face was perhaps deliberately damaged when Nineveh later fell to the Babylonians (and is further to the right of the detail shown in this exhibition), is attended by servants waving palm fronds. The king observes the capture of Lachish, a town between Mount Hebron and the coast. Israelite prisoners with stylized beards and hair—some clothed, some naked—are presented, then executed, before him. The cuneiform inscription reads,

Sennacherib, the mighty king, king of the country of Assyria, sitting on the throne of judgement, before (or at the entrance of) the city of Lachish. I give permission for its slaughter.

Literary accounts recording the trauma of this episode from the perspective of Israel survive in the Bible. Israel’s historian remembers not only its own destruction, but also its wartime successes. During Assyria’s failed siege on Jerusalem, for example, the historian records:

The angel of the Lord set out and struck down one hundred and eighty-five thousand in the camp of the Assyrians; when morning dawned, they were all dead bodies. Then King Sennacherib of Assyria left, went home, and lived at Nineveh. (Isaiah 37:36–37; cf. 2 Kings 19:35–36 NRSV)

There is no dispute, however, that Assyria had earlier conquered Samaria:

In the ninth year of Hoshea the king of Assyria captured Samaria; he carried the Israelites away to Assyria. He placed them in Halah, on the Habor, the river of Gozan, and in the cities of the Medes. (2 Kings 17:6 NRSV)

The ten tribes of Israel were lost, and Assyria rejoiced.

References

Birch, Bruce. 1991. Let Justice Roll Down: The Old Testament, Ethics, and Christian Life (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press)

Sweeney, Marvin A. 2005. The Prophetic Literature, Interpreting Biblical Texts (Nashville: Abingdon Press)

Near the end of his song, the author of Isaiah 5 interprets with exquisite clarity the meaning behind his allegory of the vineyard:

For the vineyard of the Lord of hosts
  is the house of Israel,
and the men of Judah
  are his pleasant planting;
and he looked for justice,
  but behold, bloodshed. (v.7)

Jesus will later draw on Isaiah’s imagery. In his parable of the workers in the vineyard, Jesus has the landowner insist, ‘I am doing you no wrong’ (Matthew 20:13), dismissing the ones who protest about his decision to pay all his workers the same wage—even those who had come late to his vineyard and who delivered only a bucket or two of grapes.

In Rembrandt van Rijn’s depiction of the story, those who surround the landowner grumble about fairness, but the owner points out the obvious. The workers had agreed to work for the wage they had received. They, however, were not having it. Unlike the others who had received the same wage for working fewer hours, they had laboured in the vineyard from dawn.

Trusting that their boss was not so obtuse as to be unaware of how they had contorted and twisted their bodies to release each stubborn grape from its vine, remaining all the while cautious not to seep the fruit’s precious nectar, they pleaded with him to be reasonable. Now, out of the heat from the scorching sun, these labourers barter still with the landowner, who is seated at his desk. 

Catching the long rays of the setting sun, the landowner’s wife consults their ledger, even as dark shadows, created by Rembrandt’s signature chiaroscuro, give contour to the room. The room sends a chill, as the dampness held by their dirty clothes from the sweat that had trickled down their backs throughout the day turns cold, only to confirm their misery. Behind them, another group of workers and spouses talk excitedly amongst themselves as they count their money. What wonderful fortune! What amazing luck! A day’s wage for an hour’s work? How extravagant! How generous! How kind!

In these strokes, Rembrandt depicts Jesus’s radical vision of the Kingdom of God. The Lord of Hosts ‘look[s] for justice’ (Isaiah 5:7), but this justice may be something very different from what we expect.

References

Horsley, Richard A. 2002. Jesus and Empire: The Kingdom of God and the New World Order (Minneapolis: Fortress Press)

Schottroff, Luise. 2006. The Parables of Jesus, trans. Linda M. Maloney (Minneapolis: Fortress Press)

Situated majestically at the centre of the Sistine Chapel ceiling, Michelangelo Buonarroti’s famous fresco of The Creation of Adam depicts an almost tangible electricity between God’s finger and Adam’s, as if the Creator’s divine energy will be transferred to Adam upon their touch, bestowing the creature with spiritual life, rational thought, and a moral consciousness.

It is this energy that is drained out of the canvas in Samuel Bak’s painting, based on Michelangelo’s composition. Most notably, God is absent. The hole blasted open in a bombed-out building occupies the area in which Michelangelo imagined God leaning out of the heavens towards Adam. The electricity between their fingertips is now without vitality. The source of that earlier energy—the divine hand—is now replaced by a listless, empty glove hanging on a nail that maintains its fragile grip on the otherwise besieged wall. 

Adam, dressed both in ancient drapery and modern underclothes, appears more dazed than languid in this new context. Reclining before and beside two undetonated missiles, the ruins of war surround him in wrecked furniture, broken dishes, and burnt paper. Smoke rises ominously from two chimneys visible in the distance. They are juxtaposed with a cross that stands equally threateningly in the foreground.

In Isaiah 5, the author speaks of Israel and Judah as YHWH’s ‘pleasant planting’ (5:7), and in God’s lament—‘What more was there to do for my vineyard that I have not done in it?’ (v.4)—we may hear a cry of unrequited love. But the passage goes on to announce a retraction of this favour: because of its ‘wildness’ (v.4), ‘I will make it a waste’, God says (vv.5–6). The vineyard, and all it stands for, will be undone.

The eye returns again and again in Bak’s image to negative space, to the absence of God. In that void, Bak raises timeless questions about evil and about human suffering. If Michelangelo and his patrons were confident about God’s existence—about God’s presence behind and in creation, and about God’s desire for a just society to be revealed through a covenant signed and sealed with the Jewish people—Bak depicts its undoing. Creation of Wartime III is an image of uncreation. A theology that sees divine purposes at work in the horrors of war, a theology that still affirms the reality of a covenant with Israel, even the barest belief in the very existence of God: for Bak, it was all undone in the Shoah.

References

Langer, Lawrence. 2012. Adam and Eve in the Art of Samuel Bak (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press)

Nolan Fewell, Danna, Gary A. Phillips, and Yvonne Sherwood (eds). 2008. Representing the Irreparable: The Shoah, the Bible, and the Art of Samuel Bak (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press)