Where does ‘the grapes of wrath’ come from?

The vintage in Revelation

The words “grapes of wrath” appear nowhere in the Bible, but the picture does. In Revelation 14, John sees two harvests. First, one like a son of man reaps the earth with a sickle. Then an angel with a sharp sickle is told to gather the clusters of the vine of the earth, “for the earth’s grapes are fully ripe!”

The angel thrust his sickle into the earth, and gathered the vintage of the earth and threw it into the great wine press of the wrath of God. The wine press was trodden outside of the city, and blood came out of the wine press, up to the bridles of the horses, as far as one thousand six hundred stadia.

Sixteen hundred stadia is about 300 kilometers (185 miles), which many commentators note is roughly the length of the Holy Land. Later the rider called Faithful and True “treads the wine press of the fierceness of the wrath of God, the Almighty” (Revelation 19:15).

An old image

Everyone in the ancient Mediterranean knew a wine press: a vat cut in the rock where barefoot workers trampled the grapes until the red juice ran down a channel. Genesis already calls wine “the blood of grapes” (Genesis 49:11). The prophets turned the scene into judgment. Joel cries, “Come, tread, for the wine press is full” (Joel 3:13). Isaiah sees a warrior coming from Edom in red-stained clothes, and asks why.

I have trodden the wine press alone. Of the peoples, no one was with me. Yes, I trod them in my anger and trampled them in my wrath.

The Battle Hymn of the Republic

In November 1861, Julia Ward Howe, a Boston poet and abolitionist, visited Union army camps near Washington and heard soldiers singing “John Brown’s Body.” A friend, the minister James Freeman Clarke, urged her to write better words for the tune. She wrote them in the early hours at Washington’s Willard Hotel, and The Atlantic Monthly printed them in February 1862.

Her first verse packs Isaiah and Revelation into four lines: “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord; / He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored; / He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword: / His truth is marching on.” The grapes are the evil God will crush, and for Howe and the soldiers who sang it, that meant slavery. Martin Luther King Jr. ended his last speech, in Memphis on April 3, 1968, with her first line.

Steinbeck’s novel

In 1938 John Steinbeck was finishing a novel about the Joads, an Oklahoma farm family driven off their land by drought and the banks, who head for California and find only work at starvation wages. His wife, Carol, found the title in Howe’s hymn. The Grapes of Wrath came out in 1939, won the Pulitzer Prize and became a John Ford film with Henry Fonda in 1940. Steinbeck turned the image toward the poor themselves: “In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.”

So the line runs from Isaiah’s wine press to Patmos, from Patmos to a Washington hotel, and from there to a migrant camp in California.