What Does Isaiah 5:6 Mean?
I will set it as a waste. It shall not be pruned or dug, but briers and thorns shall come up. I will also command the clouds to drop no rain upon it.
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
And 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.THE KEY
The vineyard is made waste by subtraction: tending stops, and even the rain is commanded away.
THE MEANING
You meet a vineyard where pruning and hoeing stop, briars and thorns rise, and the clouds are ordered to withhold rain. The violence is deliberate: the one who tends the vineyard removes its care and commands the rain away.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
Ruin only happens when something visibly attacks what is growing; here stopping its care and withholding rain are themselves deliberate acts of destruction.
THE ROOT
מָטָר
māṭār
GROWS FROM
מטר
Rain; to rain.
“drop no rain” in this verse is māṭār. Isaiah repeats מטר in the act of causing rain and in the noun for rain itself. The command stops both the watering and the water, making the drought deliberate rather than incidental.
ALSO GROWS
māṭar: To rain.
מָטַר
This verbal form names the action the command prevents.
māṭār: Rain, rainfall.
מָטָר
The noun repeats the root after the verb, naming the very water being withheld.
יִזָּמֵר
yizzāmer
GROWS FROM
זמר
To prune or trim, especially a vine.
“pruned” in this verse is yizzāmer. The pruning verb יִזָּמֵר (yizzāmer) shares זמר with זְמוֹרָה (zemorah), a vine shoot. English separates the work from the growth it shapes; here that shaping stops, leaving the shoots untended.
ALSO GROWS
zāmar: To prune or trim a vine.
זָמַר
This is the root verb behind the verse’s pruning word.
zemorah: A vine branch or shoot.
זְמוֹרָה
The shared root links the pruning work to the branch it shapes.
יֵעָדֵר
yēʿādēr
GROWS FROM
עדר
To hoe, cultivate, or work the soil.
The word translated “digged” points to cultivating the ground. Alongside pruning, its absence removes tending from both vine and soil.
ALSO GROWS
ʿādar: To hoe or cultivate.
עָדַר
This is the root action that the verse says will cease.
maʿdēr: A hoe or mattock.
מַעְדֵּר
The tool name shows the root’s connection to working the ground.
THE PATTERN
When cultivation or provision is withdrawn, fruitfulness gives way to thorns and barrenness.
Thorns also and thistles shall it sprout for you, and you shall eat the grass of the field.Then the burning of the LORD's anger will flare against you, and he will shut the heavens, so that there is no rain, and the ground will not give its yield, and you will perish swiftly from upon the good ground which the LORD gives you.And other seed fell among the thorns, and the thorns climbed up and choked it, and it gave no fruit.THE THREAD
Who gives rain upon the face of the ground, and sends waters upon the fields.Job uses the same root מטר for the rain given across the earth. Isaiah uses that root for rain commanded away, making the withheld water the deliberate reversal of this giving.
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