To get up onto one's feet: to rise from lying, sitting, or being still, and stand upright. Casey notes the sense of standing up into the midst: not just leaving the floor but entering the room, becoming present and countable. It is the same motion that means to wake, to be raised, to take a stand.
The corpus uses it 161 times, and the range is the lesson: young women wake for a bridegroom, a queen rises at the judgment, nation rises against nation, and a dead girl is told, in two words, to get up. One bodily verb (the body coming upright) carries waking, standing, opposing, and resurrection. Aramaic does not have a separate, holier word for the last of these. Rising is rising.
| Form | Pattern | Transliteration | Script | Standard | Qala rendering |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Verb, perfect | Peal | qām | קם ܩܳܡ | he rose, stood | woke up (Mt 25:7); rose |
| Imperative (fs) | Peal | qumy | קומי ܩܽܘܡܝ | rise! (to a girl) | Talitha, qumi: get up (Mk 5:41) |
| Verb, imperfect (3fs) | Peal | tqum | תקום ܬ݁ܩܽܘܡ | she will rise | will rise at the judgment (Mt 12:42) |
| Verb, imperfect (3ms) | Peal | nqum | נקום ܢܩܽܘܡ | it will rise | Nation will rise against nation (Mt 24:7) |
| Noun | qyāmtā | baqyāmtā ("at the resurrection") | בקימתא ܒ݁ܰܩܝܳܡܬ݁ܳܐ | resurrection (Greek: anastasis) | the rising |
| Stem | Form | Sense | In this corpus |
|---|---|---|---|
| Peal | qām | to rise, stand up, get up | throughout: Mt 12:42; 24:7; 25:7; Mk 5:41 |
| Ethpeel | — | — | not attested in this corpus |
| Pael | qayem | to establish, confirm (standard grammar) | standard grammar scaffold; not cited here from the corpus |
| Ethpaal | — | — | not attested in this corpus |
| Aphel | ʾaqim | to raise up, set up (standard grammar) | standard grammar scaffold; not cited here from the corpus |
| Ettaphal | — | — | not attested in this corpus |
| Shaphel | — | — | not attested in this corpus |
Tomorrow morning, at the moment you get out of bed, say qum to yourself as you stand, one syllable for the whole event: sleep ending, the body coming upright, the day beginning. That plain motion is the corpus's word for waking, for standing to testify, and for resurrection. Feel the continuity: every morning rehearses the vocabulary of the largest promise the text makes. You already know this verb in your bones; you do it daily.
Hebrew has the same root, qûm: everywhere in the Bible, most famously in the feminine imperative of Isaiah 60:1, qûmî ʾôrî, "arise, shine," the very form spoken to the little girl in Mark 5:41. The noun qyāmtā, "resurrection" (where the Greek reads anastasis), is transparently just "the standing-up." Within the 75, this root is the mirror of tomorrow's Y-T-B: sit: rising and sitting, the two hinges on which a human day turns.
Take two or three minutes and teach a friend the two words talitha qumi: little girl, get up. Explain that the second word is the same verb they use every morning getting out of bed, the same verb behind "resurrection," and the same verb for a witness standing up in court. Then ask them (and yourself) what, this season, is being told to get up.