“Talitha koum”
Mark 5:41
Foreign wordSettledJesus
Taking her by the hand, Jesus said, 'Talitha koum!' which means, 'Little girl, I say to you, get up!' (Mark 5:41 BSB)
* Aramaic, the ordinary words of a household: 'little lamb, get up.'
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.
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.
Parallels: Matthew 9:25; Luke 8:54