What Does Isaiah 24:7 Mean?
The new wine mourns, the vine droops, all the glad of heart groan.
Key words are shown with the Hebrew or Greek and what each word meant.
Selah Decoded Version The Selah Decoded Version renders what the Hebrew and Greek words meant to the people who first heard them.
King James wording
King James Version
The new wine mourneth, the vine languisheth, all the merryhearted do sigh.THE KEY
Gladness is not sealed off from its sources: when the vine’s life falters, the heart joins the lament.
THE MEANING
Sorrow reaches from the vineyard into the inner life: the wine mourns, the vine languishes, and the merryhearted sigh. The verse shows gladness as connected to what nourishes it, so what fails around the heart can sound within it.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that joy can remain untouched when what nourishes it is failing.
THE ROOT
אָבַל
ʾāval
GROWS FROM
אבל
to mourn, grieve, lament
“mourneth” in this verse is ʾāval. The new wine takes the verb for mourning, so grief is not confined to the human heart: the source of festivity is pictured as a mourner too. Alongside the vine’s decline and the hearts’ sigh, the root makes this one shared lament moving from what nourishes to those nourished.
ALSO GROWS
ʾēvel: mourning, grief
אֵבֶל
This noun makes the wine’s personified grief part of the same word family as mourning itself.
ʾāvēl: a mourner, one who grieves
אָבֵל
The root can name both the grief and the one who carries it; here even the wine is cast in the mourner’s role.
אֻמְלְלָה
ʾumlelāh
GROWS FROM
אמל
to droop, languish, waste away
“droops” in this verse is ʾumlelāh. The root names a wasting or drooping, making the vine’s decline an active collapse in the same sequence as mourning and sighing. The same root describes a fig tree in Joel 1:12, where the verse also says that joy has withered from people.
ALSO GROWS
ʾāmal: to languish, droop, waste away
אָמַל
This is the root verb behind the vine’s weakening.
ʾumlal: languished, withered
אֻמְלַל
This form appears of the fig tree in Joel 1:12, where the failing plant is joined to the loss of human joy.
THE PATTERN
When what sustains shared celebration fails, grief reaches the heart and silences gladness.
The vine has withered, the fig tree wilts; pomegranate, date palm, and apple, all the trees of the field, have dried up; for the leaping has withered from the children of humankind.And I will overturn your feasts into mourning, and all your songs into lamentation. I will bring sackcloth up upon all loins, and a shaved head upon every head. I will make it like the mourning of an only son, and its end like a bitter day.And the traders of the earth shall weep and mourn over her, for no one buys their cargo any longer.THE THREAD
The vine has withered, the fig tree wilts; pomegranate, date palm, and apple, all the trees of the field, have dried up; for the leaping has withered from the children of humankind.Isaiah’s אֻמְלְלָה (ʾumlelāh, “languishes”) and Joel’s אֻמְלַל (ʾumlal, “languished”) share the root אמל (ʾ-m-l, “languish”). Joel makes the connection explicit: as the plants fail, joy itself is said to wither from people.
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