egeirō

At its plainest, this word is about coming out of sleep. It works both ways: you can wake another person, or you can wake up and get going yourself. The same word does both because the action is one motion seen from two sides, rousing and rising.

The Gospel writers use it for ordinary mornings and for moments of crisis. The disciples wake Jesus in the storm; an angel tells Joseph to get up in the night and flee. The line between literally waking and simply getting moving is thin here, which is why this everyday sense sits next to the call to stir into action.

Here the action is bodily: rising from where you sat or lay, or being pulled upright by another. It covers a person who simply stands up and a sick or fallen person lifted to their feet.

This is the word in the healing stories. Jesus says to the paralyzed or the lame, get up and walk, and he takes them by the hand and raises them. The point is plain and physical: someone who could not stand is now standing, often as a sign of being made well.

Beyond the body, the word describes God or history putting a figure or a force into play. God raises up a king, a savior, a witness, or children for Abraham. In the same way false prophets and hostile nations are said to rise, that is, to come forward and arise on the stage of events.

The image is still upward and active, but the subject is now a person or power being set in motion rather than a body standing up. It is the word for someone appearing where they were not before, summoned, stirred up, or raised into prominence.

This is the word's weightiest use and its most frequent in the New Testament. It names the act of bringing a dead person back to life and, in the passive, the dead person coming back. It runs from the people Jesus restores during his ministry to the general rising of all the dead at the end.

Above all it is the standard word for the resurrection of Jesus. He was raised on the third day, and again and again the early preaching turns on the claim that God raised him from the dead. Paul builds the whole argument of 1 Corinthians 15 on this one verb: if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised either.

The same picture of waking and standing up underlies all of this. Death is spoken of as sleep, and resurrection as being woken and lifted to one's feet, which is why the plain words for waking and getting up carry this deepest meaning.