sharash

This is the verb that belongs to the noun for a root (שֹׁרֶשׁ). To do it is to put roots down: a vine spreads them out under the ground, grips the soil, and only then starts to thrive. Planting is only half of the story in Hebrew. Someone else does the planting, but the plant itself has to root, and until it has, nothing about its future is safe.

Almost every time, the plant in view is a person or a nation:

• a vine carried out of Egypt whose roots go deep until it fills the land (Psalm 80:9)
• a people who will root, blossom, and cover the whole world with fruit (Isaiah 27:6)
• the wicked whom God himself planted, now rooted and bearing fruit, which is exactly what makes the prophet complain (Jeremiah 12:2)
• a fool seen settling in comfortably, right before his home is cursed (Job 5:3)
• rulers whose stock barely gets a grip in the ground before a breath of wind withers them (Isaiah 40:24)

So the word carries hope and warning equally well. Rooting is what security looks like from the outside, and the writers use it both for the real thing that God gives and for the false version that a fool or a tyrant seems to have for a while. One passage turns the verb around: God does not merely watch a vine root, he clears the ground and makes its roots take hold, which is a stronger claim than planting on its own.

The same verb, turned around, means the opposite of taking root: not giving roots but taking them away. Hebrew can build a verb from a noun and then use it either way, much as English "to dust" can mean putting dust on something or getting dust off it. Nobody reading Hebrew is confused by this, because the sentence settles it: what is planted, watered, and fruitful is rooting, and what is being burned, torn out, or removed from the land is being rooted out.

What this verb removes does not come back. Fire eats a man's harvest all the way down (Job 31:12), his children are ripped out of the ground where they grew (Job 31:8), and a smooth talker is dragged out of his tent and out of the land of the living (Psalm 52:5). The point in each case is not damage but removal at the source, the one kind of loss a farmer cannot recover from by waiting.

That makes it a strong word for judgment, and a deliberate reversal: a people God planted and rooted can be unrooted by the same hand. Other Hebrew verbs say "pull up" more bluntly (compare נָתַשׁ and עָקַר); this one says it while still holding the picture of the roots themselves in view.