What is going on with Legion and the pigs?

Why does Legion beg to go into the pigs? Why does Jesus let them? Why do the pigs then rush into the sea? A spiritual event is being depicted in these physical elements.

The story of Legion is repeated three times in scripture: Mark 5:1-13; Luke 8:26-33; Matthew 8:28-32. Apparently it is important; yet several elements are perplexing to the modern Christian.

This is generally a clue that we’re missing something that scripture’s authors took for granted.

What might that be? Here are two relevant beliefs which were common to ancient peoples, and don’t enter our minds today:

1. Water was believed to be a natural barrier to spirits. This is most obviously demonstrated in the common motif of deceased spirits having to cross a river, like the Styx, to enter the land of the dead. The river functioned to keep the dead in their proper domain since they could not cross it unaided. The same motif appears in Greco-Roman stories of spirits which are defeated by driving them into the sea (e.g. Pausanias, Elis 6), and in the ancient attitude toward those who died at sea. For example, the Athenians erected cenotaphs on the seashore—empty tombs or monuments in honour of someone whose remains were elsewhere—and called the names of the dead three times, so they could return to land (Odyssey 9.62–66).

2. There was no clear distinction between ghosts and demons. In modern Christianity, everyone “just knows” that demons are fallen angels like Satan. But this idea only seems to become ubiquitous in the church somewhere around the fifth century; it is foreign to the text of scripture and to the worldview of those who wrote it. In Judaism, the widely-accepted view of demons was that they were the spirits of dead Nephilim; not fallen angels. Demons, in other words, were a particular kind of ghost. Angels are far more powerful beings, and would generally have no reason to want to get “inside” someone.

(This is a difficult topic to disentangle because the Greek term daimon is used very much like the Hebrew term elohim to refer to any spirit—which is probably where the confusion arose in the first place. There is also a connection in scripture between angels and ghosts.)

When we combine these beliefs about water, ghosts and demons, some interesting clues start to emerge:

Setting

Both Mark and Luke explicitly place the meeting between Legion and Jesus at the seashore. The confrontation is taking place at the boundary between earth and water—a dangerous place for spirits. Note also that the pigs demonstrate Jesus’ immediate audience to be Greco-Roman, not Jewish—Jews would never farm pigs, since they are unclean.

Legion’s worry

In Luke, Legion begs Jesus not to send him into the “abyss” (Gk. abussou). We tend to interpret that language in terms of Revelation 9:1; 11:7 etc, where abussou is often translated “bottomless pit.” But there is at least a double meaning likely here, because abussou is also how the LXX (Greek OT) translates the Hebrew tehom, the “great deep,” in places like Genesis 1:2 and 7:11.

In Mark’s account, most translations have Legion begging Jesus not to drive him out of the “country” or “region” (chora). But chora also simply means the land as opposed to the sea; for example, it is used this way in Acts 27:27. Given the explicitly seaside location, this makes sense—Legion doesn’t want to leave the land, because the alternative is the water. Indeed, although I can’t imagine Pausanias was familiar with Mark, he strikingly uses the same expression to describe how, in Euthymus’ defeat of the Hero, the ghost was “was driven out of the land and disappeared, sinking into the depth of the sea” (Elis 6.6.10).

Legion’s affinity for the desert

Finally, there’s another small hint also included in Luke 8:29, where it observes about the demoniac:

He was kept under guard and bound with chains and shackles, but he would break the bonds and be driven by the demon into the desert.

This connection between spirits and dry places is also drawn in other places like Matthew 12:43; Luke 11:24—further suggesting we’re on the right track in thinking that the sea is where Legion definitely does not want to go.

Putting the clues together

Combining these clues with the ancient presupposition that spirits were in some way bound or destroyed by water, it isn’t hard to see what is going on here: Jesus meets Legion by the sea, and Legion assumes Jesus is going to send him into the abyss to be bound or destroyed. Demons, of course, don’t have a physical form that can be harmed by water; yet at the same time there is a symbolic connection between physical geography and the “terrain” of the spirit world (cf. territorial spirits; Daniel 10:13, 20 etc). The water represents something in the cosmic geography, and Legion doesn’t want to go there. So he asks Jesus to instead go into the pigs.

Why Jesus allows this is straightforward: it serves his purpose extremely well. The demons thought the pigs were their out. After all, why should Jesus care if unclean animals were possessed? Maybe he’d just let that slide. They weren’t even in Jewish territory, after all.

But Jesus didn’t intend to let it slide; he intended to get rid of the demons permanently, and to use the pigs as physical vessels to demonstrate this. The pigs are very convenient to him: spirits are incorporeal (or perhaps semi-corporeal—who is to say), so if Jesus sends Legion out of the man and directly into the spiritual abyss, there will be no physical evidence. No ordinary human could witness such an event because we cannot see spirits or their realm. Thus, the power of the event is diminished. The demoniac is healed—but what happened to the demons? Perhaps they are looking for a new victim right now (cf. Matthew 12:44-45)!

By sending Legion into the pigs, and then over the cliff into the water, Jesus is able to demonstrate his power not just in expelling unclean spirits, but also in dealing to them permanently: in judging them, binding them, and destroying them. Whether the sea is really a “conduit” to the place that demons are bound in the spirit-world isn’t the issue. It represents that place—so by sending the demons into the sea, Jesus fully and incontrovertibly vindicates Legion’s own claim that he is the son of the Most High God.