yaqats

This is the plain Hebrew verb for a person waking up. It is always the sleeper's own waking, never one person shaking another awake, and it names the instant of coming to rather than the state of being awake afterward. Every one of its eleven appearances is a narrative moment: someone was out, and now they are not.

In the stories it does a particular job. It marks the point where a person comes to and finds out what happened while they were under.

• Noah wakes from his wine and learns what his youngest son had done to him.
• Jacob wakes at Bethel and realizes the LORD had been in that place all along.
• Samson wakes from Delilah's lap and does not yet know that his strength has gone.
• Pharaoh and Solomon wake and see that what they had just lived through was a dream.

The verb by itself only means "to wake"; the discovery belongs to the story around it. But the pattern is worth noticing, because in these narratives waking up is the hinge between not knowing and knowing.

Twice the picture is stretched beyond ordinary sleep. A psalm says the Lord woke "like a sleeper," like a soldier shouting after wine, when he finally moved against his people's enemies, and Elijah jeers that Baal may be asleep and in need of waking. A prophet uses it once of creditors who will suddenly stir and come for a plunderer. Two close relatives share this ground: קִיץ, which covers the same everyday waking but also reaches to the dead waking from the sleep of death, and the broader עוּר, which stirs up not only sleepers but winds, nations, and a person's own spirit.