“Child, arise”
But Jesus took her by the hand and called out, 'Child, get up!' Her spirit returned, and at once she got up. And He directed that she be given something to eat. (Luke 8:54–55 BSB)
What it sounds like today
A mysterious incantation in a foreign tongue.
The cultural key
It is the opposite of an incantation: everyday Aramaic, the language of the household, preserved verbatim and immediately translated by Mark. Talitha is a tender word, 'little girl' (related to the word for a young lamb); cumi is simply 'get up.' Pagan healing formulas traded on secret words and exotic syllables; Mark shows the rawest of miracles being worked with the words a mother uses to wake her child. The exactness suggests eyewitness memory; Peter was in the room. Luke renders in Greek what Mark preserves in Aramaic (Talitha cumi), and adds two details: 'her spirit returned,' and the instruction to feed her, the homeliest possible proof that a resurrected girl is really, bodily alive and hungry.
Recovered meaning
No formula, no theater: a twelve-year-old is dead, and Jesus takes her hand and says, in effect, 'Sweetheart, time to get up.' The gentleness is the theology.