This bit is usually titled the “Parable of the Sower”, but I always thought it should be called the “Lazy Farmer” because he clearly wasn’t paying any attention to where he was tossing his seed. For those with ears to hear, he’s not really talking about agriculture, but explaining one idea with another. “He who has ears to hear,” not everyone present, listening, will understand or take to heart the message being sent. But for those who knew the shape of the world in those days, the message was crystal clear.
At a glance, this appears to be a good lesson for farmers – one takes care to spread their seed only upon good soil for best results. But folks who had been farming for generations hardly needed to be told where to put their seed and had a deep understanding of soil variations in the area. This was not meant to be an agricultural lesson, but an obvious ground upon which to explain how this metaphor was going to work. This parable is about Roman civilization, which provides the pax Romani the peace of Rome, through which all merchants prospered for many centuries. Its presentation is meant to be a guide for the reader.
The sower is the Emperor, and the seed is Roman civilization. In some places they have attempted to plant it, it has been rejected and this is seen as a flaw in the region – specifically the people in that region. The places where Rome was accepted are fruitful and profitable, with yields x30, x60 and x100. The message to the Judeans is clear – go along to get along with Rome now, and things will be lollipops and roses. Go against Rome and receive the treatment the Sower delivers to thorny soil.
The phrase “he who has ears to hear” and some text that appears in the next few verses from a passage in Isaiah 6 ties this story to one in Isaiah 5. The parable of the vineyard in Isaiah is where the master of a vineyard has done everything to create the perfect vineyard and expects a great reward but gets nothing, so he tears out his vineyard and lets it go to seed. And then the author is very explicit about the meaning of his story: the vineyard is Judah, the vines are the Judeans, and their inability to produce grapes behave in a sober and productive manner is the root of their own demise. And God the master of the vineyard is going to tear the rotten plants out and take up pottery or something.
It’s worth it to say a few things about Isaiah the Prophet. His context was at the end of the Judean kingdom, after Assyria had swallowed Samaria, but prior to their invasion of Judah…
Ok, maybe a little more context would be helpful. For something like two thousand years, the Egyptian empire stretched from the upper Nile through the Levant to the hills of Anatolia. As their power ebbed, the various tribes in the Levant began to self-govern and created small tribal enclaves – like Samaria and Judah, and empires from the Mesopotamian valley began to stretch into what had been Egyptian territory, slowly eating away at the tiny states that had formed in the absence of Egyptian power. Assyria was one of those emerging states.
Standard practice for emerging empires at the time had been to uproot the upper class folks in an area being captured to a place near to the imperial capitol, then move their own folks where they could take over the gathering of taxes and imparting of justice in the new lands, while the wealthy and literate outlanders were kept on a short leash. This was both efficient in the collection of taxes and helpful in the repression of violent uprisings. This is what happened to the royal families of the Levant and they lived several generations in the heart of Babylon before they were able to return.
So, obviously Isaiah was predicting this very catastrophe, but the reason there is a book of Isaiah is not because they were taken away, but because they were brought back. Power dynamics in the Mesopotamian basin were anything but stable, and when the Persians first came to power, they were convinced to return the Hebrew priestly families to their lands and help to rebuild their Temple. (Babylonians sacked the first Temple built by Solomon.) Part of what convinced Cyrus was the scrolls that carried the myths and history of their peoples, along with the prophecies of their return – this material makes up 9/10ths of the Old Testament in the Christian Bible. Isaiah’s predictions that they would return is what helped bring them back.
And it probably went a long way toward convincing the locals that they really belonged there after being gone for several generations. Culturally, these Hebrew royalty were a puzzling mix of ancient Egyptian and Babylonian on a flatbread of Aramaic poetry and Canaanite legends, and this integration of cultures enabled them to remain simultaneously distinct from their neighbors as well as well positioned for interactions with the great empires surrounding them.
So the Parable of the Sower and the Parable of the Vineyard are both talking about the peoples in roughly the same area on the map. They both impune these people for not accepting the authority of the True God, and for this sin they are destroyed.