Beyond the Chains, the Crowd, and the Grave

The manuscripts disagree about the place: Gerasenes in the oldest copies of Mark, Gadarenes in the Received Text, Gergesenes in others. Gerasa lay over thirty miles from the lake and Gadara about six. A steep slope at Kursi on the east shore is often proposed as the site. Either way, this is Gentile country.

The man meets Jesus as he steps off the boat, before anyone else can speak. Tombs made a person unclean by contact (Numbers 19:16), and on the eastern shore they were caves cut into the limestone hillsides, the kind of shelter a man driven out of a town might find.

Isaiah 65:4 describes a rebellious people “which remain among the graves” and “eat swine’s flesh”, the same pairing of tombs and pigs this chapter brings together. The Greek piles up negatives, “no one any longer could, not even with a chain”, as if every attempt had been tried and abandoned.

“Fetters” are shackles for the feet and “chains” are for the hands. “Tame” is damasai, the word for breaking in a wild animal, the verb James 3:7–8 uses of beasts and the tongue. The townspeople have treated him as a creature to be subdued, and failed.

“Cutting himself” is katakoptōn, gashing, and the loose flints of the hillside would serve. The Law forbade Israel to cut the body for the dead (Leviticus 19:28), and the prophets of Baal gashed themselves with knives on Carmel (1 Kings 18:28). “Crying” is a raw word for shouting or shrieking.

A man no one could bind runs toward Jesus rather than away. “Worshipped” is prosekynēsen, to prostrate oneself, a gesture of homage that need not mean devotion; the soldiers do the same in mockery in 15:19. “Afar off” suggests the man saw the boat come in and ran down the slope.

“The most high God” is the title for Israel’s God used by or before outsiders in the Old Testament: Melchizedek (Genesis 14:19), Balaam (Numbers 24:16), Nebuchadnezzar (Daniel 4:34). It fits Gentile ground. “I adjure thee” is horkizō, the formula exorcists used to bind a spirit, here turned on the exorcist himself.

“For he said” is an imperfect, “he had been saying”. The Book of Mark explains the spirit’s plea after the fact: the command to come out was already given before the spirit begged not to be tormented. The order of events is reversed in the telling to put the cry first.

A Roman legion numbered about five or six thousand men. The Tenth Legion, Fretensis, stationed in Syria and later in Judaea, carried a boar among its emblems, which some readers link to the pigs in verse 11. Jesus asks the question; the answer comes in a singular that becomes a plural.

“The country” is chōra, the region. The spirits fear being sent out of the district, as though they belonged to it. Luke’s version has them begging not to be sent “into the deep”, the abyss (Luke 8:31). “Besought him much” is the same verb the townspeople and the healed man will use.

Pigs were unclean under Leviticus 11:7, and no Jewish farmer would raise them. A great herd on this hillside shows that the land belongs to the Greek cities of the Decapolis, where pork was eaten and pigs were sacrificed. “Nigh unto the mountains” means on the slope above the shore.

For the first time the spirits speak as a group, “all the devils”, without the man’s voice in the way. “That we may enter into them” shows spirits seeking a body to live in, and asking to move from one host to another rather than be left without any.

Only Mark gives the figure of two thousand, a herd worth a small fortune. “A steep place” is krēmnos, a cliff or bank. “Choked” is epnigonto, imperfect: they drowned one after another. The Book of Mark puts the number in a parenthesis, as if it were a note added for the reader.

The herdsmen were answerable to owners, so their first job was to report. “The city” is probably Gerasa or Gadara, and “the country” is agrous, the farms around it. The report brings out a second crowd, curious rather than desperate, “to see what it was”.

Three participles: sitting, clothed, sound-minded. “Clothed” implies he had been naked, which Luke 8:27 states and Mark leaves the reader to infer. “In his right mind” is sōphronounta, from sōphrosynē, the Greek virtue of self-control. “Had the legion” is a perfect participle: the one who had had it.

“Told” is diēgēsanto, recounted in full, the verb Jesus uses in 9:9 when he forbids the three to tell anyone of the transfiguration. Here the eyewitnesses, herdsmen and perhaps disciples, give the townspeople the whole sequence, man first and pigs second.

“Coasts” in 1611 meant borders or territory, not seashore. “Pray” is parakalein, to beg, the verb used of the spirits in verses 10 and 12 and of the healed man in verse 18. Three requests are made with one verb; Jesus grants the spirits’ and the townspeople’s, and refuses the healed man’s.

The episode began as Jesus stepped out of the boat (verse 2) and ends as he steps back in. The man who ran to him at the landing is at the water again, this time asking to leave with him and give up his own country.

Elsewhere in Mark those healed are told to keep quiet (1:44, 5:43, 7:36). In Gentile territory, where there is no crowd ready to make Jesus a king, the order is reversed: go and tell. “To thy friends” is literally “to your own people”. “The Lord” here could mean God; verse 20 puts Jesus in its place.

The Decapolis was a league of Greek cities, mostly east of the Jordan; Pliny lists Gadara, Hippos, Gerasa, Scythopolis, Pella and others. “Publish” is kēryssein, to preach. The man preaches in ten cities before the twelve have even been sent out (6:12).

Jesus crosses back to the western, Jewish shore, the lake’s return journey after the storm and the Gentile hillside. Mark sets him “nigh unto the sea”, at the waterline, as he was when he taught from the boat in 4:1.

Jairus is the Greek form of Jair, a name found in Numbers 32:41, and often explained as “he will enlighten” or “he will awaken”; the meaning is debated. A ruler of the synagogue was a lay officer who arranged services and chose readers. An inscription found in Jerusalem honours one, Theodotus, who built a synagogue.

“Little daughter” is thygatrion, a diminutive of affection. “At the point of death” is literally “she has it at the last”. “Healed” is sōthē, saved: the same verb covers rescue, healing and salvation, and Jairus pairs it with “live”.

Here Mark begins one account and sets another inside it, as he did with the family and the scribes in 3:20–35 and will again with the fig tree and the temple in chapter 11. “Thronged” is synethlibon, crushed together: the whole town is pressing against the man who is trying to reach a dying child.

Under Leviticus 15:25–27 a woman with a flow of blood beyond her time was unclean, and so was anything she lay or sat on. For twelve years she would have been barred from the temple courts and would have made unclean anyone she touched. Mark does not name her.

“Suffered many things of many physicians” has a play in the Greek, polla pathousa hypo pollōn. Luke, called the physician, softens it to “could not be healed of any” (Luke 8:43). The Talmud later lists folk remedies for such a flow, including carrying the ash of an ostrich egg in a cloth.

“Heard of Jesus” is literally heard “the things about Jesus”: she comes because of reports. The garment is the himation, the outer cloak; Matthew 9:20 says she touched its hem, meaning the tassels the Law commanded (Numbers 15:38). She comes from behind, perhaps because her touch would make him unclean.

“She said” is imperfect, she kept saying it, and the saying is most likely to herself. “Whole” is sōthēsomai, the same verb as Jairus’s “healed” in verse 23. “But his clothes” means even his clothes: she does not expect to be noticed, only to reach the edge of him.

“The fountain of her blood” is the phrase used in Leviticus 12:7 for a mother’s bleeding after childbirth, the legal term for the source of the flow. Mark says she “felt in her body”, literally knew in her body, and in the next verse Jesus knows in himself. Two knowings happen at once, one on each side of the touch.

“Virtue” in 1611 meant power, from the Latin virtus; the Greek is dynamis. The sentence is careful: Jesus knows that power went out; he asks who touched. “Turned him about” shows him stopping dead in a moving crowd, on the way to a dying child.

Luke 8:45 gives this remark to Peter; Mark leaves it to the disciples as a group. It is blunt, as their “carest thou not that we perish?” was in the boat (4:38). In Mark the disciples speak to Jesus with a frankness the later Gospels often tone down.

The Greek has a feminine participle, “her that had done this”. The Book of Mark already knows it was a woman, while Jesus is still scanning the crowd. Whether Jesus knew is left open; the look continues until she chooses to come forward.

“All the truth” would include twelve years of bleeding and the fact that she, being unclean, had touched a teacher in a crowd. She confesses it publicly, falling down as Jairus did in verse 22: two people at the same feet, a ruler and a woman with no standing at all.

“Go in peace” is the Hebrew farewell of blessing, the words Eli spoke to Hannah (1 Samuel 1:17). “Hath made thee whole” is sesōken, a perfect tense: you have been saved and remain so. “Be whole of thy plague” uses a different word, hygiēs, healthy, so both her standing and her body are addressed.

“Master” is didaskalos, teacher. “Troublest” is skylleis, which first meant to flay, then to harass or pester. The messengers assume the teacher’s help ends where death begins, and they assume it in front of the father.

“Heard” is parakousas, which can mean overhearing, or disregarding; the Greek Old Testament often uses it for refusing to listen, and Matthew 18:17 has it as “neglect to hear”. Mark may mean Jesus overheard the report and ignored it. “Only believe” is a present imperative: keep on believing.

For the first time three disciples are set apart from the twelve. Peter, James and John will be taken alone up the mountain of the transfiguration (9:2) and deeper into Gethsemane (14:33). Each time, what they see is something they cannot yet explain to anyone.

“Tumult” is thorybos, uproar. Matthew 9:23 mentions flute players. The Mishnah later rules that even the poorest man in Israel must hire at least two flutes and one wailing woman for his wife’s funeral, so the noise here was expected and partly professional.

“Ado” is thorybeisthe, the verb from the same root as the tumult. Sleep is already the Bible’s word for death that awaits a waking: “many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake” (Daniel 12:2). “Damsel” is paidion, a little child.

“Laughed him to scorn” is a 1611 idiom for katagelaō, to laugh down, and the tense means they went on laughing. “Put them all out” is ekbalōn, the verb Mark uses for casting out devils, now used of the mourners. Five witnesses go in: two parents and three disciples.

The Aramaic is talitha qumi; talitha means a lamb and was used for a young girl, much as English says “lamb” to a child. Some manuscripts spell the verb koum, the masculine form, as spoken Aramaic often did. The words “I say unto thee” are Mark’s addition in translating, not part of the Aramaic.

“Arose” is anestē, and “walked” is imperfect, she began walking about. “Astonished with a great astonishment” is a Hebrew way of intensifying by repetition; the noun is ekstasis, the origin of the English word ecstasy, meaning to be put out of one’s senses.

“Charged them straitly” is diesteilato polla, gave strict orders. The order is almost impossible to keep: a houseful of mourners knew she was dead and would soon see her alive. In Mark such commands keep failing, and the Book of Mark records them anyway.