Isaiah 27King James Version
In that day, the Lord with his sore and great and strong sword shall punish leviathan the piercing serpent. Yet 'I the Lord do keep it; I will water it every moment: lest any hurt it, I will keep it night and day.' The vineyard is now beloved, not condemned.
God defeats Leviathan, the chaos serpent. The vineyard of Israel, previously abandoned to thorns, is now tended carefully by God himself. The chapter closes with the great trumpet gathering the scattered exiles from Assyria and Egypt to worship in Jerusalem. Judgment has a terminus; exile has an end.
God defeats the chaos monster, tends his own vineyard, and calls the scattered home. The vine that seemed abandoned still belongs to its planter.
verse: "I the LORD do keep it; I will water it every moment: lest any hurt it, I will keep it night and day", God reverses the vineyard-abandoned image from chapter 5, now claiming active, vigilant gardening instead of withdrawal.
The imagery moves between mythic combat with a sea-dragon and the practical scene of a hillside vineyard in Palestine. In the background, exiles have been scattered for years along the roads to Assyria and Egypt. The trumpet that calls them home would have been heard as the jubilee trumpet, the year of return.
Leviathan the piercing and crooked serpent, representing chaos and enemy empires. The vineyard as Israel or Judah, tended by the LORD. The scattered exiles from Assyria and Egypt returned by the great trumpet. No individual human characters.
The Leviathan defeat (v. 1) frames the entire apocalypse section (chapters 24-27) with a creation-order myth: the primordial chaos dragon will be finally slain. The vineyard re-tended reverses chapter 5 and bookends a major Isaiah theme. The great trumpet gathering anticipates the resurrection trumpet of 1 Thessalonians 4.
For when you feel abandoned and wonder if God has given up tending what he planted. The reassurance that he waters it every moment, night and day, cuts through any theology of divine neglect.
1In that day the LORD with his sore and great and strong sword shall punish leviathan the piercing serpent, even leviathan that crooked serpent; and he shall slay the dragon that is in the sea.
2In that day sing ye unto her, A vineyard of red wine.
3I the LORD do keep it; I will water it every moment: lest any hurt it, I will keep it night and day.
4Fury is not in me: who would set the briers and thorns against me in battle? I would go through them, I would burn them together.
5Or let him take hold of my strength, that he may make peace with me; and he shall make peace with me.
6He shall cause them that come of Jacob to take root: Israel shall blossom and bud, and fill the face of the world with fruit.
7Hath he smitten him, as he smote those that smote him? or is he slain according to the slaughter of them that are slain by him?
8In measure, when it shooteth forth, thou wilt debate with it: he stayeth his rough wind in the day of the east wind.
9By this therefore shall the iniquity of Jacob be purged; and this is all the fruit to take away his sin; when he maketh all the stones of the altar as chalkstones that are beaten in sunder, the groves and images shall not stand up.
10Yet the defenced city shall be desolate, and the habitation forsaken, and left like a wilderness: there shall the calf feed, and there shall he lie down, and consume the branches thereof.
11When the boughs thereof are withered, they shall be broken off: the women come, and set them on fire: for it is a people of no understanding: therefore he that made them will not have mercy on them, and he that formed them will shew them no favour.
12And it shall come to pass in that day, that the LORD shall beat off from the channel of the river unto the stream of Egypt, and ye shall be gathered one by one, O ye children of Israel.
13And it shall come to pass in that day, that the great trumpet shall be blown, and they shall come which were ready to perish in the land of Assyria, and the outcasts in the land of Egypt, and shall worship the LORD in the holy mount at Jerusalem.