Isaiah 11 Bible study: A shoot from the stock of Jesse

The chapter before ends with trees coming down: "The tall will be cut down, and the lofty will be brought low" (10:33), and "He will cut down the thickets of the forest with iron, and Lebanon will fall by the Mighty One" (10:34). Then: "A shoot will come out of the stock of Jesse, and a branch out of his roots will bear fruit" (11:1) (tap stock, branch, roots). In Hebrew stock is geza, which Strong's gives as "the trunk or stump of a tree (as felled or as planted)". Job uses the word of a tree cut down: "Though its root grows old in the earth, and its stock dies in the ground" (Job 14:8), "yet through the scent of water it will bud" (Job 14:9). Here is what almost everyone misses: the verse names Jesse, not David. Isaiah names David in ten verses of the WEB, and Jesse only here and in 11:10. Jesse is David's father: "Now David was the son of that Ephrathite of Bethlehem Judah, whose name was Jesse" (1 Samuel 17:12).

Isaiah 11:4→leads to2 Thessalonians 2:8

Isaiah says of the shoot from the stock of Jesse (Isaiah 11:1), "He will strike the earth with the rod of his mouth; and with the breath of his lips he will kill the wicked" (Isaiah 11:4). Paul, Silvanus, and Timothy (2 Thessalonians 1:1) write "concerning the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ" (2 Thessalonians 2:1), and say of "the lawless one" (2 Thessalonians 2:8) that "the Lord will kill with the breath of his mouth and destroy by the manifestation of his coming" (2 Thessalonians 2:8). The letter doesn't name Isaiah, so setting the two side by side is a reading, and nothing is claimed about the Greek. It rests on a shared subject: one who kills the wicked with the breath of his mouth. One reading hears Isaiah 11:4 in the letter's words, spoken there of the coming of the Lord Jesus. Another reads Isaiah 11:4 of the shoot's just rule over the earth (Isaiah 11:3-5), with nothing said of the lawless one, and reads the letter's words on their own. This line names no one, then or now, as the wicked of Isaiah 11:4 or the lawless one of the letter.

שֹׁרֶשׁshoreshsay SHO-resh

Brown-Driver-Briggs: "root". Strong's: "a root (literally or figuratively)". The chapter has it twice. First the branch comes "out of his roots" (11:1), Jesse's. Then the one the nations seek is himself "the root of Jesse" (11:10). Isaiah has the word seven times in Hebrew. Paul gives 11:10's words: "There will be the root of Jesse, he who arises to rule over the Gentiles" (Romans 15:12). Job's tree has it too: "Though its root grows old in the earth" (Job 14:8).