to wake or rouse: to bring something from rest, sleep, or stillness into alertness and action, or to come awake oneself
At its center this word marks the moment a thing passes from rest into action. It is the eye opening, the sleeper sitting up, the still figure springing to life. Around that single image the Bible turns the word in three natural directions, and the same Hebrew form can carry any of them depending on who is being roused and toward what.
The plainest use is literal waking, whether from ordinary sleep, from the sleep of death, or as a way of saying someone is alert when others are not. From there it becomes a summons: a person calls on himself, on a city, or on God to stop being still and rise to the moment, the repeated cry "Awake, awake!" that runs through the Psalms and Isaiah. And it reaches its widest use when one party stirs another into motion, God stirring a king's heart, an enemy raising an army, hatred kindling a quarrel.
These are not separate words but one word leaning toward sleep at one end and toward incitement at the other. What holds them together is the shift from inactivity to activity. The reader should hear that shift even where English picks a different verb (wake, rouse, stir up, raise, bestir), and should be slow to force a hard line between waking someone and stirring someone, since the Hebrew often holds both at once.