to smell: to take in a scent, and so, when God is the one smelling, to receive an offering with favor
Hebrew has one verb for smelling, and most of the time it does exactly the work you would expect. Isaac smells his son's clothes before he blesses him. Anyone who mixes the sacred incense for the pleasure of its scent is cut off from the people. Idols carved from wood and stone are mocked for having noses they cannot use.
From there the word takes one short step that shapes most of its appearances. When God smells the smoke rising from an altar, the sentence is not a remark about odor: it is the Bible's way of saying the offering was welcome and the worshipper received. That is why the same verb, turned negative, becomes one of the sharpest refusals in the prophets. A God who will not smell Israel's festivals is a God turning the whole of its worship away.
The verb also covers picking up a scent before its source arrives. A war horse catches the smell of battle while it is still far off, and a strand of tow snaps the moment it senses fire. Isaiah stretches the word once more, for the coming king, in a line readers still argue over: either he delights in the fear of the LORD the way one delights in a fragrance, or he perceives by it, quick and certain, rather than by what his eyes see and his ears hear.
The matching noun for the scent itself (רֵיחַ) stands beside the verb in half of its appearances, so the Hebrew often reads that someone smelled the smell of a thing, a doubling English usually smooths away.
Nuances
How to read the verb in Isaiah 11:3, where its object is "the fear of the LORD".
- majorityIt means to take delight in, so the coming ruler's delight is in the fear of the LORD; the sense follows the well established idiom in which smelling an offering means welcoming it.; BDB, s.v. רוח; HALOT, s.v. רוח
- minorityIt retains the perceptual force of scenting, so the ruler judges by an immediate God-given discernment rather than by what he sees and hears, which matches the contrast drawn in the rest of the verse.; Hans Wildberger, Isaiah 1-12 (Continental Commentaries)
- minorityThe clause is a secondary addition, drawn from the reference to the spirit of the LORD in the preceding verse, and should be deleted rather than interpreted.; Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, apparatus at Isaiah 11:3; Joseph Blenkinsopp, Isaiah 1-39 (Anchor Yale Bible 19)