Jeremiah 23:5
Jeremiah 23:55Behold, the days are coming, declares the LORD, when I will raise up for David a righteous Branch, and He will reign wisely as King and will administer justice and righteousness in the land.
Read straightforwardly as Messianic — the promised Davidic king who reigns with insight and justice. The Watchtower reads the verse comfortably; the difficulty for the JW reading begins at verse 6, where the same king is named "Jehovah Is Our Righteousness."
sets up the trinitarian dilemma of verse 6. The same Messianic figure that JWs accept here is, in the next verse, given the divine name as his own name. Pair the two verses with ("Mighty God"), read through (Isaiah saw Jesus' glory), and (a shared name signals a shared nature). The promised righteous king is not merely Jehovah's appointee; he bears Jehovah's name because he shares Jehovah's nature.
The Hebrew tsemach — the standard Messianic vocabulary used in , , and — has been rendered "Branch" in the English Bible tradition for four centuries (KJV, ESV, NASB; NIV "Branch"). The NWT renders it "righteous sprout." The translation is defensible at the level of bare Hebrew vocabulary, but it severs the intertextual cord between and the broader prophetic Branch-Messiah pattern. A reader using the NWT will not see Jeremiah, Isaiah, and Zechariah linking arms over the same Messianic title; the thread of canonical typology is quietly cut.