The Hebrew shava (also written shaw-ah) means to cry aloud, shout for help, or call urgently for rescue. It is an intensive word for desperate prayer — not quiet petition but the full-throated cry of someone in dire need.
Shava is the vocabulary of crisis prayer. It appears most prominently in the psalms of lament, where the psalmist cries out from the depths to a God who hears (Psalm 88:1; 142:1). Job uses it to describe his relentless but apparently unanswered cries to God in his suffering (Job 19:7; 30:20). The theological significance is profound: this word affirms that God is the only One who can respond to ultimate need. Israel's cry in Egypt used this vocabulary (Exodus 2:23, using the related root za'aq), and God's response defined the Exodus. Psalm 22 — the Psalm Jesus quoted from the cross — is saturated with this cry vocabulary, establishing the cross as the supreme moment of shava and the resurrection as God's ultimate answer.