In Mark 5:1–20 (and the parallel accounts in Matthew 8:28–34 and Luke 8:26–39), Jesus crosses to the Gentile side of the Sea of Galilee and meets a man so tormented by a legion of demons that he lives among the tombs. When Jesus casts the demons out, they beg Him to send them into a nearby herd of swine instead of into the abyss. Jesus grants the request; the pigs rush over a cliff into the sea and drown; the freed man is found “sitting, and clothed, and in his right mind” (Mark 5:15). For modern readers the destruction of the pigs is the puzzle. Once you see the setting — the Gentile region, the unclean animals, the demons’ own request, and the local economy of Roman occupation — the scene reads quite differently from how it sounds at first.
The setting matters
The action takes place in “the country of the Gadarenes” (Matthew) / “Gerasenes” (Mark, Luke) — the Decapolis, a Hellenized Gentile region east of the Sea of Galilee. Several details about the setting are doing real work in the story.
Pigs were unclean for Jewish readers. Leviticus 11:7–8 names the swine as ceremonially unclean; observant Jews did not eat them or raise them. The presence of a herd of about two thousand pigs (Mark 5:13) tells us immediately that this is Gentile country.
The demoniac lives among the tombs. Tombs were also ritually unclean. Mark stacks the uncleanness — Gentile country, unclean man, unclean spirits, unclean animals, unclean place — into one tight scene. The whole landscape is the kind of place a devout first-century Jew would have considered impossibly defiled. And it is exactly where Jesus comes to set someone free.
The man is in extreme suffering. He is naked, screaming in the tombs, cutting himself with stones, breaking chains people have used to restrain him (Mark 5:3–5; Luke 8:27, 29). Mark emphasizes the cruelty of his condition. Whatever else is happening, this is a story about a real person whose life has been broken by powers he cannot fight on his own.
What the demons were asking for
When Jesus confronts them, the demons name themselves “Legion: for we are many” (Mark 5:9). A Roman legion was 6,000 soldiers — the word itself is a military term, with the menace of occupation built into it. The demons beg Jesus not to send them “out of the country” (Mark 5:10) and not to send them “into the deep” (Luke 8:31). The deep — Greek abyssos — is the place of restrained evil in Jewish apocalyptic literature (Revelation 9:1–11; cf. 2 Peter 2:4; Jude 6). They know they have an appointment with judgment, and they are asking for the appointment to be delayed.
The pigs are their alternative request. Jesus grants it.
What happens to the pigs is what the demons were after the man
The pigs then “ran violently down a steep place into the sea…and were choked in the sea” (Mark 5:13). Many careful readers have noticed that what the demons do to the pigs is exactly what they had been trying to do to the man: drive him toward self-destruction. The demoniac had been cutting himself with stones, breaking chains, living in the place of death. The pigs’ fate makes visible — and final — what the demons had been working toward in his life.
That visibility matters. The crowd that comes out to see what happened (Mark 5:14–17) can now see what was actually at stake. The man is sitting clothed and in his right mind; the pigs are dead in the water. The destructiveness of the demons is on display. The freedom of the man is on display next to it.
Why didn’t Jesus just send the demons to the abyss?
The text doesn’t tell us why Jesus granted the demons’ request rather than refusing it. Several reasonable readings have been suggested, and each has something to commend it.
One reading: a visible demonstration. Without the pigs, the crowd has no visual evidence of what just happened. With the pigs, the scale of the man’s deliverance is unmistakable. The demonstration is for the community more than for the man, who has been delivered either way.
Another reading: a foretaste of the appointed judgment. The demons asked not to be sent to the abyss yet (Matthew 8:29: “art thou come hither to torment us before the time?”). Jesus does not send them there now — that judgment is for the time, the day of judgment — but their fate in the water is a sign of what is coming.
A third reading: the swineherds and the crowd. The herd of two thousand pigs implies a significant local economy — possibly supplying nearby Roman garrisons. The destruction of the pigs is a real economic loss for the owners, and it is precisely the loss that drives the crowd to ask Jesus to leave (Mark 5:17). The scene exposes what the surrounding community valued more: the pigs or the man. They chose the pigs. Jesus’ refusal to protect the herd is partly a moral mirror held up to their priorities.
The text does not require us to choose only one of these. The honest answer is that Jesus’ decision is partly inscrutable — He grants a request the demons make, and the result advances all three of the purposes above.
What about the pigs themselves?
This is the modern reader’s most direct question. A few honest things to say.
First, the loss of the pigs is real, and the text does not pretend otherwise. The herd’s destruction is grievous and the crowd treats it as such. Scripture does not encourage us to be callous about it.
Second, in the moral universe of the passage, the man is the priority — the human being tormented for years, restored to his right mind, his family, his community. When a life is being saved and a herd is being lost, Scripture places the life above the herd. Christians have read this scene for two thousand years as showing Jesus’ unwavering valuation of a single suffering person.
Third, the pigs were not eternal beings. The demons were. The act displays Jesus’ authority over the demons in a way that also reveals what was actually after the man’s life all along.
The man at the end
Mark and Luke spend their longest sentences on the end of the story, not the pigs. The freed man wants to go with Jesus. Jesus tells him to go home and tell what God has done. Luke writes: “And he went his way, and published throughout the whole city how great things Jesus had done unto him” (Luke 8:39 KJV). The first Gentile missionary, in effect, is sent back to his own people with a story he can tell from his own life.
The crowd asked Jesus to leave. The freed man asked to come along. Jesus, gently, sends the man back into the very community that had been afraid of him, so the community can see what He saw.
What this scene teaches
A few pastoral things.
Demonic power is real in Scripture, and it always works toward destruction. The Gospels do not treat it as a metaphor or as a problem we can rationalize away. They treat it as something Jesus has authority over and we do not.
People in tormented places — among the tombs, broken by chains, beyond the help others can give — are not beyond Jesus’ care. The Gerasene man is not the only person in Scripture whose life looked like nothing could fix it. The story is here partly so that readers like him would know they are seen.
And there is a hard mirror here for communities. Sometimes a community is more comfortable with the demoniac in the tombs than with the cost of freedom. The crowd in Mark 5 chose the pigs over the man. The challenge is to choose differently when the moment comes to us.
Reading Mark 5 in context
For more on this scene — the geography of the Decapolis, the Gentile setting, the symbolism of the abyss, the early church’s reading of the freed man’s mission, and the underlying Greek behind Legion — The Context Bible opens up five lenses on every verse of Mark 5. Open it in your browser or download free.
“And he saith unto them, Be of good cheer; it is I; be not afraid.” — Mark 6:50 KJV
