Talitha koum is the actual Aramaic Jesus spoke to a dead girl, as plain as waking a child for breakfast.
Talitha koum is not really one word but a short phrase Mark kept in Aramaic and then translated for his Greek readers. Talitha is the feminine form for a young girl, often carrying a fond, diminutive edge, closer to "little one" or even "little lamb" than a clinical "child." Koum is simply the ordinary command "get up," the same word you might use to rouse someone from sleep, with no ritual weight of its own.
What makes the phrase hard to carry into English whole is that it is doing two jobs at once: it names the child with tenderness and it gives her the plainest possible instruction. English has to pick a register. Say "little girl" and you keep the affection but lose the fact that this was spoken, not written, in Jesus' own tongue. Say "arise" and you gain solemnity the original never had.
While He was still speaking, messengers from the house of Jairus arrived and said, “Your daughter is dead; why bother the Teacher anymore?”
Messengers report the girl has died, setting up why these particular words will matter.
He went inside and asked, “Why all this commotion and weeping? The child is not dead, but asleep.”
Jesus calls her sleeping rather than dead, framing the ordinary tone of what he's about to say.
Taking her by the hand, Jesus said, “Talitha koum!” which means, “Little girl, I say to you, get up!”
The only place in the Bible the phrase occurs, transliterated from Aramaic and then translated by Mark.
Immediately the girl got up and began to walk around (she was twelve years old). And at once they were utterly astounded.
She gets up and walks at once, showing the command was met as literally as it was spoken.
Most English versions land on "little girl, get up" or "little girl, arise" (ESV, NIV, NRSV), while the KJV's "damsel, I say unto thee, arise" adds a formality the Aramaic doesn't carry. Mark himself supplies the translation right in the text, which is unusual and worth noticing. The cost of any English rendering is flattening what is, underneath, a bedside phrase into something that reads like liturgy.
People sometimes treat Talitha koum as a special healing formula, as if the sounds themselves carried power, the kind of claim that turns up in bad word-studies about "Bible magic words." Mark gives no hint of that. He preserves it because it is what Jesus actually said, in the language he actually spoke, and then translates it so his readers won't miss the meaning.
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