“Justice, but saw bloodshed”
He looked for justice, but saw bloodshed; for righteousness, but heard a cry of distress. (Isaiah 5:7 BSB)
What it sounds like today
A plain statement that God wanted good but found evil.
The cultural key
The verse ends the Song of the Vineyard with a devastating double pun that only works in Hebrew. God looked for mishpat, 'justice,' but found mispach, 'bloodshed', two words that sound almost identical, a single letter apart. Then He looked for tsedaqah, 'righteousness,' but heard tse'aqah, 'a cry' (the scream of the oppressed), again nearly the same sound. The wordplay is the point: what God planted looked, from a distance, almost right, the words are close enough to be mistaken for each other, but on inspection the good word has curdled into its ugly near-twin. Justice slid into bloodshed, righteousness into screaming. English can only footnote the puns, but they turn a general complaint into a precise, chilling portrait of a society that kept the sound of virtue while losing its substance.
Recovered meaning
The line hides two Hebrew puns, justice (mishpat) soured into bloodshed (mispach), righteousness (tsedaqah) into a cry (tse'aqah), near-identical words a hair apart. The sound-alikes show a society that kept virtue's appearance while its substance rotted.