to go up: to move, or to carry something, from a lower place to a higher one
At its core this is the plain verb for upward movement, and almost everything it does grows out of that one picture. Its natural opposite is the word for going down (יָרַד), and the two are constantly paired. A person climbs a mountain, an army marches up into the hill country, smoke curls off an altar, dawn comes up over the horizon, a plant pushes out of the ground. The same word covers all of it, because Hebrew sees them as one motion: from low to high.
Once you see the picture, the odder uses stop looking odd:
- an army "goes up" against a city, which is simply how Hebrew says it attacks
- a boundary line "goes up" from one landmark to the next as a surveyor traces it
- a cry of distress "goes up" and reaches God
- a thought "comes up" on the heart, much as English says something crosses the mind
- the cud "comes up" again in an animal that chews it
Two further things stretched the range. First, geography and worship gave "up" a settled meaning: you went up into the land, up the central ridge to Jerusalem, up to the temple, up to the altar, so going up became shorthand for pilgrimage, for invasion, and later for coming home from exile in Babylon. Second, the same word can mean not just "go up" but "make something go up," and that opens its two weightiest uses: bringing an animal up onto the altar, which is what offering a sacrifice is; and the great recital line that God "brought you up out of the land of Egypt." The burnt offering itself is named from this word, as "the thing that goes up."
So the senses below are not different words but one word in different settings. The thread running through every one of them is upward direction. When the scene supplies a hill, it is climbing; when it supplies an altar, it is offering; when it supplies a vine, it is sprouting. The word itself never changes its mind, it only follows the scene it is in.
Nuances
Disputed
What exactly "goes up" in the burnt offering, which is named from this word: the smoke rising to heaven, or the animal being lifted onto the altar.
- majorityThe name pictures the offering ascending to God as smoke, which is why the traditional English "burnt offering" is a fair rendering: the ascent only happens because the animal is burned.; Brown, Driver, Briggs, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (BDB), s.v. עֹלָה; Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus 1-16 (Anchor Bible, 1991), 172-73
- minorityThe name pictures the offering going up onto the altar, the physical presentation of the victim rather than the rising of its smoke.; Baruch A. Levine, Leviticus (JPS Torah Commentary, 1989), 5-6; Baruch A. Levine, In the Presence of the Lord (SJLA 5; Brill, 1974)
When and where the exodus recital "brought you up out of the land of Egypt" arose, alongside the rival wording "brought you out of the land of Egypt".
- contestedThe "brought up" wording is oriented to the destination, the land, and so can only have arisen after the conquest; it was at home in the northern kingdom, especially at the shrines of Bethel and Dan, which is why it appears in the golden calf acclamation and in Hosea.; J. Wijngaards, "הוֹצִיא and הֶעֱלָה: A Twofold Approach to the Exodus," Vetus Testamentum 15 (1965): 91-102
- contestedThe tradition history cannot be reconstructed this confidently, since the golden calf narrative on which the northern argument leans is now widely dated late, whether Deuteronomistic or later still.; Konrad Schmid, The Old Testament: A Literary History (Fortress, 2012); Jan Christian Gertz, Tradition und Redaktion in der Exoduserzählung (FRLANT 186; Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2000); Thomas Römer, The So-Called Deuteronomistic History (T&T Clark, 2005)