To come: the plain motion of arriving, drawing near, showing up where you are. The ordinary verb for one body moving toward another or toward a place. Nothing in the root is grand; it is the word for a neighbor at the door as much as for anything in heaven.
It is also, by count, the great arrival-verb of the corpus: 535 occurrences, more than any other root in this tier. Crowds come, seed-eating birds come, the evil one comes, a figure comes walking on the sea, and in the prayer at the center of everything, the reign is asked to come. The corpus is thick with arrivals, and this one root carries nearly all of them.
| Form | Pattern | Transliteration | Script | Standard | Qala rendering |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Verb, perfect | Peal | ʾetā | אתא ܐܶܬ݂ܳܐ | he came | he came to them (Mt 14:25) |
| Verb, active participle | Peal | ʾāte | אתא ܐܳܬ݂ܶܐ | comes, is coming | the evil one comes (Mt 13:19) |
| Verb, imperfect (3fs) | Peal | tiʾte | תאתא ܬ݁ܺܐܬ݂ܶܐ | may it come | May your reign come (Mt 6:10) |
| Noun, "coming" | meʾtithā | meʾtiteh ("his coming") | מאתיתה ܡܶܐܬ݂ܺܝܬ݂ܶܗ | coming (Greek: parousia) | his coming |
| Stem | Form | Sense | In this corpus |
|---|---|---|---|
| Peal | ʾetā | to come, arrive, draw near | throughout: Mt 6:10; 13:19; 14:25 |
| Ethpeel | — | — | not attested in this corpus |
| Pael | — | — | not attested in this corpus |
| Ethpaal | — | — | not attested in this corpus |
| Aphel | ʾayti | to bring: to cause to come (standard grammar) | standard grammar scaffold; not cited here from the corpus |
| Ettaphal | — | — | not attested in this corpus |
| Shaphel | — | — | not attested in this corpus |
Stand still somewhere today and let things come to you instead of going to them: a sound, a smell, a person crossing the room, a thought. Notice how different receiving an arrival feels from making one. Then say tiʾte malkutakh (may your reign come) and notice what the prayer assumes: that you are not asked to storm the reign or build it, only to want its arrival enough to say so, and to be findable when it comes.
Hebrew has the cognate ʾātâ, a poetic verb of coming found mostly in the Bible's older songs. This root also survives inside the earliest recorded Christian prayer: maranatha (1 Corinthians 16:22), left in Aramaic in the middle of a Greek letter: read either as māranā thā, "our Lord, come!", or māran ʾethā, "our Lord has come." Either way, the verb is ʾ-T-Y. Its noun meʾtithā, "the coming," is the word standing where the Greek text reads parousia. Within the 75 it is the mirror of tomorrow's ʾ-Z-L: go, and in the prayer it joins hands with M-L-K: reign.
Take two or three minutes and teach a friend the line tiʾte malkutakh: may your reign come. Explain that the verb is the same plain "come" used when a friend comes over, and why that matters: the prayer asks for an arrival, not an escape. If they know the word maranatha, show them the same root hiding inside it.