Legion - The Gods of the Bible

Mark 5:1-20

Mark 5:1-20, in every translation this tool compares.

First, in plain English

Asked for his name, the demon answers with a number. The scene happens across the lake in the Decapolis. Heiser ties that territory to the Enochic tradition about the spirits of the dead giants and reads the geography as part of the argument; that link is his reading, not something Mark says. Then come the pigs.

What the text says

A name given as a number, in the Decapolis, across the lake, in the region the Enochic tradition ties to the territory of the giants' spirits. The pigs and the drowning are the scene; the geography carries the argument.

Second Temple witness

1 Enoch 15:8-12 explains demons as the disembodied spirits of the dead giants, the framework Mark's audience would have had. At death the giants' spirits come out of their bodies to plague humankind, and they are set apart from heavenly spirits whose proper home is heaven. The geography sharpens it. Bashan's ancient boundaries match the area where Jesus performs this exorcism, and Second Temple Jews understood the demons there as Watcher-spirits released at the death of the ancient Nephilim and Rephaim; the Dead Sea Scrolls call them "bastard spirits," the hybrid offspring of Genesis 6:1-4. In Jubilees 10, Mastema, leader of the evil spirits, bargains to keep a tenth of the demons active on earth under his command ("if none of them is left for me I shall not be able to exercise the authority of my will among humankind"), God grants it, and the other nine-tenths go to the place of judgment, a different Second Temple accounting of the problem Legion embodies. This Enoch and Jubilees reading of Genesis 6:1-4 became the standard lens carried into the New Testament period, and a recent ICC commentary on 1 Peter traces the same Watcher framework through the "spirits in prison" of 1 Peter 3:19-20, reading them against this Second Temple material instead of as an isolated image.

Where scholars disagree

DDD's Legion article (H. D. Betz) doesn't use the giants'-spirits framework at all and reads the name through anti-Roman polemic. A legion was the largest unit of the Roman army, and the story has Legion's cohorts drowned along with two thousand pigs, an image DDD calls an obvious, deliberate insult to the occupation. DDD also traces a later Jewish magical tradition in the Testament of Solomon (11:1-6), where the demon reveals that his true name isn't Legion but "the Lion-Shaped Demon, an Arab by descent," with Legion describing his function, "the name for all demons which are under me." The Gospel text supports the demonological reading without ruling out the political one DDD favors.

Where it appears

Mark 5:1-20
Luke 8:26-39

Related beings

Daimonion Rephaim

In the Divine Council Index

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Sources

Heiser, *Demons*, 138-139
Heiser, *Reversing Hermon*, 100, 110
Emily J. Thomassen, "Jesus' Journey into Gentile Territories," Lexham Geographic Commentary on the Gospels, 253
Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 477
David Horrell and Travis B. Williams, *A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on 1 Peter 3-5*, ICC, 2:219-220
Archie T. Wright, *The Origin of Evil Spirits: The Reception of Genesis 6:1-4 in Early Jewish Literature* (WUNT 198, Mohr Siebeck, 2013), not checked directly; the reception-history argument rests on the other sources listed
Stuckenbruck, "Giant Mythology and Demonology"
H. D. Betz, DDD s.v. "Legion," 507-508