Mark5chapter 5

The eastern shore was Gentile country, part of the Decapolis league of Greek cities, which is why a herd of two thousand pigs was grazing there — no Jewish community would have kept them. The precise town is uncertain; ancient manuscripts vary between Gerasa, Gadara, and Gergesa, all names in that same region.

The tombs where the man lived were rock-cut chambers in the hillsides, and living among them put a person outside the community in every sense. Mark's description of the chains and shackles being torn apart is the language of someone reporting what the locals had repeatedly tried.

The name the spirit gives is a Roman military term, and Mark's readers knew its weight exactly: a legion was a formation of some five to six thousand soldiers. Nothing in the ancient world sounded more like organised, overwhelming force.

Back across the lake, Jairus is called a ruler of the synagogue — an actual office, attested on inscriptions across the Mediterranean world, responsible for the building and the ordering of worship. He was the local establishment, on his knees in public. The woman who interrupts had spent everything on physicians, which Mark says bluntly left her worse; and her twelve-year flow of blood made her ritually unclean, so every person she pressed through in that crowd was defiled by the contact.