Israel-as-vineyard imagery from Isaiah 5 forms the strongest scriptural backdrop, but Luke’s parable focuses especially on the tenants entrusted with the vineyard and their treatment of the owner’s messengers and son.

The repeated rejection of God’s servants in 2 Chronicles 36 provides a major biblical narrative backdrop for Jesus’ vineyard parable, where successive servants are beaten or rejected before the beloved son is sent. Luke does not quote Chronicles directly, but the tenants’ violence belongs to Israel’s wider prophetic-rejection pattern.

Jesus explicitly quotes Psalm 118’s rejected-stone saying after the vineyard parable, moving from the rejected son to the stone rejected by builders that becomes foundational. The quotation turns the psalm into an authoritative interpretive lens on Jesus’ rejection and vindication.

Falling on a stone and being crushed resonates with Isaiah’s stumbling stone and Daniel’s kingdom stone imagery. Luke does not name either text here, so both belong in Explore Evidence rather than explicit-quotation status.

Luke 20 quotes Psalm 118’s rejected stone in Jesus’ temple controversy; Acts 4 explicitly identifies Jesus as “the stone” rejected by the builders who has become the head of the corner.