Commentaria in Isaiam
“It hath given forth against me its voice (its cry), therefore have I hated it.”
Otherwise Sanchez: A cry, he says, is every sin, which cries in the ears of God and rouses him to awake to vengeance; and especially those four enormous ones, which are therefore called sins crying to heaven, namely first, the oppression of the poor, of widows and orphans; second, voluntary homicide and parricide; third, the defrauded wages of workmen; fourth, the sin of Sodom.
Note: In the Hebrew there is an elegant paronomasia: I looked for mishpat, that is judgment, and behold mispach, that is iniquity; I looked for tsedaqah, that is justice, and behold tse’aqah, that is a cry; as if to say: I looked for equity, and behold iniquity; for justice, and behold injustice: I looked for the dispensing of justice, and behold dissipation.
8. Woe to you that join house to house, and so on, even to the end of the place!—to the end of the place, that is of the field or the city; as if to say: Woe to you, avaricious ones, who by right and wrong would seize all things, who join fields to fields and houses to houses until you possess the whole space of a city or region, which you have set for your greed or ambition. This passage explains the bitterness of these wild grapes, namely of iniquity and the cry; hence in this verse he strikes at the pride and avarice of the rich, especially of the more opulent and powerful; in verse 11 their drunkenness; in verse 18 their obstinacy:
Here, therefore, he rebukes ambition and greed. The first wild grape is ambition, the beginning of injury and violence, which, in order to stand out above others, despoils others and sustains its pomp and state from the plunder of others: as Nero did, who made all Rome serve his delights or ambition, says Martial. For greed is insatiable, and therefore is the mother and origin of all evils, as the Apostle testifies: and therefore both Christ and Isaias threaten the rich and covetous with the woe of eternal damnation: this, then, is the first wild grape.
Shall you alone dwell in the midst of the earth?—As if to say: So great is your greed that you seem to wish to occupy alone, even to dwell on, the whole earth, and to be kings of the whole world. For “in the midst of the earth” is the same as in the whole earth, as if the whole earth were one house of yours, in the midst of which you dwell, as a king sits in the midst of his kingdom, commanding and ruling on every side.
So Nero built at Rome so vast a palace (we see even today its huge walls and masonry) that it occupied a great part of the city; hence they made sport of him and it with this verse:
Rome is become a house: migrate to Veii, Quirites, if that house does not occupy Veii too.
What dost thou, O unhappy miser? Do not three cubits of earth alone await thee? Is not a little stone enough to cover thy wretched body? Why then dost thou seek so eagerly so many estates and riches, and covet and heap up the hindrances of eternal blessedness? The Poet said truly: “The world does not suffice for the youth of Pella (Alexander the Great): he will be content with a coffin.” Surely “yesterday the whole world did not contain Alexander: today, dead, six feet of earth will contain and bury him.” St. Bernard, in his letter to Henry, Archbishop of Sens, turns this saying of Isaias against ecclesiastics who heap up benefices and dignities: “O,” he says, “ever infinite ambition, and insatiable avarice! When a man has been made Dean, Provost, Archdeacon, and so on, in any Church, not content with one in one place, he strives to gather to himself many, indeed as many honours as he can, in one place as in several. But will he be satisfied? Made Bishop or Archbishop, he desires still more. Having perhaps attained that, he again dreams of something higher, and resolves by costly intimacies and toilsome services to frequent the Roman palace. Woe to you that join house to house!” and so on.
Admirably St. Ambrose, in his book On Naboth and Achab, chap. 1: “How long,” he says, “will you rich extend your mad covetousness? Shall you alone dwell upon the earth? Why do you cast out your fellow in nature, and claim possession for yourselves? The earth was founded for all in common, rich and poor alike; why do you, rich men, arrogate to yourselves a right of soil that is your own? Nature knows not the rich, who begets all poor. She brought them forth naked into the light, needy of food, clothing and drink: the earth receives naked those whom it brought forth, and knows not how to enclose the bounds of possessions in the tomb. A narrow turf is enough alike for the poor and the rich; and the earth which did not satisfy the desire of the living holds the whole rich man now.” And chap. 3: “Bird joins bird, cattle are joined to cattle, fish to fish: and they count it not a loss but a commerce of life when they gain a great company, and seek a kind of protection in the comfort of a more frequent society. Thou alone, O man, shut out thy fellow: thou shuttest in wild beasts, thou buildest dwellings for beasts, thou destroyest those of men.” And chap. 6: “The Gentiles call Dis the ruler of the nether world, the arbiter of death. They call him Dis, and rich, because the rich man knows not how to bring anything but death, whose kingdom is over the dead, whose seat is hell. For what is a rich man but a kind of insatiable whirlpool of riches? an insatiable hunger of gold? the more he has drawn, the more he burns.” And chap. 12: “For everyone who abounds judges himself the poorer, because he thinks lacking to himself whatever is possessed by others. He wants the whole world whose desires the world does not hold; but of him who is faithful the whole world is the riches.”
Even the Gentile Seneca, in his 90th letter, says: Of old, according to Virgil, Georgics 1:
No husbandmen subdued the fields, nor was it even lawful to mark or divide the land with a boundary: men sought for the common store, and the earth herself bore all things more freely, when none demanded.
But now, he says, “avarice has burst in upon things excellently ordered; and while it desires to set something apart and turn it to its own, it has made all things another’s; and reducing things to narrow limits, it has brought poverty, and by desiring much has lost all. Though you add field to field, no extension of boundaries will bring us back to where we departed from: we shall have much, we had the whole.”
your notorious quarrels, frauds, robberies, oppressions of the poor, and in turn their laments and cries; and I lend them not deaf but open ears, that they may rouse my vengeance, and it may leap furiously upon you.
Unless many houses be desolate.—“Unless” among the Hebrews is a word of execratory oath, in which by aposiopesis one must understand: “Otherwise let me not be held God or true”; as the Latins say: “May I perish if I have not done this”; but the Hebrews, for euphemism, as if for the sake of a good omen, suppress that imprecation, which is so great and so near to the Divine Majesty that one dare not express it; as if to say: I swear by my deity and my truth that your houses and fields, which you so greedily and avariciously heap up without measure and limit, I will destroy and reduce to solitude and sterility, so that from ten acres of vineyards you will gather so few grapes that from them you can press out only one flagon of wine, and from a copious sowing of thirty bushels you will scarcely gather in the harvest three bushels, that is the tenth part of the seed: this is the fitting wages of avarice, namely sterility and poverty, which doubtless befell the Jews, especially in the wars, the siege and the destruction by the Romans.
Morally, learn here how vain and pernicious riches and possessions are, if anyone covetously guards them and fixes his hope and heart on them. The ancients teach the same. First, David, Psalm 48: “When a man shall be made rich; for when he shall die, he shall take nothing away; neither shall his glory descend with him”; and Psalm 61:10–11: “But vain are the sons of men, the sons of men are liars in the balances: that by vanity they may together deceive. Trust not in iniquity, and cover not robberies: if riches abound, set not your heart upon them.”
loves riches shall reap no fruit from them; and this also is vanity. Where there are great riches, there are also many to eat them. And what doth it profit the owner, but that he seeth the riches with his eyes? As he came forth naked from his mother’s womb, so shall he return, and shall take nothing with him of his labour”; and Wisdom 5: “What hath pride profited us? or what advantage hath the boasting of riches brought us? All those things are passed away like a shadow,” and so on.
Third, Christ, Matthew chapter 6, verse 19 and following: “Lay not up to yourselves treasures on earth, where the rust and moth consume, and where thieves break through and steal. But lay up to yourselves treasures in heaven,” and so on. “You cannot serve God and mammon. … It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven.” See also the history of the rich glutton, Luke 16.