The third antiphon, for 19th December, is O Radix Jesse:
O Radix Jesse, qui stas in signum populorum, super quem continebunt reges os suum, quem gentes deprecabuntur: veni ad liberandum nos, jam noli tardare.
O Root of Jesse, which standest for an ensign of the people, at whom kings shall shut their mouths, to whom the Gentiles shall seek: Come and deliver us, and tarry not.
"Radix Jesse" derives from Isaiah 11:1, "Et egredietur virga de radice Iesse, Et flos de radice eius ascendet," "And there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots." Jesse was the father of King David, founder of the Davidic dynasty of the kings of Judah. To see the force of the image one must indulge in a little arboriculture. At the end of the garden belonging to a house where I once lived there stood the stump of a horse-chestnut tree, cut down years earlier by some previous occupier. The cutting-down, one might have thought, would have been the end of that tree; but no, new shoots, new branches, grew up from that stump. It was very much alive. The Davidic dynasty came to a sticky and apparently final end when Zedekiah, the last king of Judah, was taken prisoner by the King of Babylon: "And they slew the sons of Zedekiah before his eyes, and put out the eyes of Zedekiah, and bound him with fetters of brass,! and carried him to Babylon" (2 Kings 25:7) where he subsequently died. To all appearances, this was the end of the line of David. But the Jews believed that God would send a Messiah, an "Anointed One," a king in succession to David, a new branch growing up from that truncated tree. The antiphon salutes Jesus as that new shoot, growing from the stump of Jesse.
If we move on to Isaiah 11:10 we find more of our antiphon: "In die illa radix Iesse, Qui stat in signum populorum, Ipsum gentes deprecabuntur," "In that day there shall be a root of Jesse, which shall stand for an ensign of the people; to it shall the Gentiles seek." The remaining portion of the antiphon we find at Isaiah 52:15, "Super ipsum continebunt reges os suum," "The kings shall shut their mouths at him." For Christians, this is a key passage of Isaiah, for it occurs at the beginning of one of the "suffering servant" passages, which Christians have always understood as referring to Christ:
He was despised and rejected by men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief; and as one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that made us whole, and with his stripes we are healed. (Isaiah 53:3-5)
More anon.