LandonWillis

Category: Greek

  • What Was The Hexapla Of Origen?

    Origen was an early Christian scholar. He was likely born around 185 and died around 254.

    Of his many written works, there is one that is extremely fascinating to Bible translators: the Hexapla.

    Hexapla is just the Greek word for “six-fold”. We refer to this work of Origen as the “Hexapla” because it contains six different columns, side by side, each with a different translation of the Old Testament.

    Purpose

    Origen’s goal was apparently to verify that the Septuagint was still a faithful translation of the original Hebrew Old Testament.

    So, the most important column is the one which lists the Septuagint translation. He added lots of notes and markings to this column to make it clear where he felt the Septuagint failed to properly translate the original Hebrew.

    Timing

    Now, we don’t know exactly when Origen started on this monumental work (and yes, it was a MONUMENTAL work; he basically had to handwrite the entire Old Testament six times over). But scholars typically agree that he finished by the year 240 and that it must have taken at least 20 years to complete. So, he probably started on this project in the 210s or early 220s.

    One issue with this is that he didn’t have access to the original copies of the Old Testament (they were all long gone by the time he was born). Even though he had older texts than we do, he was still working with copies of copies.

    That again ties in with the whole reason he created the Hexapla. By comparing several different translations with the best Hebrew manuscripts he can get, he would be able to compare them and come to the most likely conclusion of what the original text likely said. This is exactly what modern Biblical scholars do when preparing to make a new translation into English or any other language.

    In fact, because of this, some say that Origen’s Hexapla was the first ever Interlinear Bible.

    The Columns

    As for the columns themselves, remember, the purpose was to ensure that the Septuagint remained as accurate and faithful to the original Hebrew as possible. Every column aside from the Septuagint is there just to help you understand the proper and correct reading. They also all work together to allow you to reconstruct the original Hebrew text.

    Each of the six columns on each page contains the same few verses of scripture, just in a different translation for each column.

    Caveat

    We’ll go into a detailed analysis of each column in a moment, but first, I need to make something clear.

    This great, revolutionary work that compiled translations? The Hexapla? A resource which sounds so beneficial to modern Bible translators?

    It no longer exists.

    Only one complete copy is ever known to have existed, the one created by Origen himself. In fact, there is a common joke told that ancient scholars didn’t believe that a single man could have written out such a massive text in his lifetime. Modern scholars estimate that the Hexapla was probably around 6,000 or so pages long.

    So, yeah, it wasn’t the easiest thing to make a copy of. To do so would require you to handwrite the entire Old Testament six times over in different translations.

    The Hexapla remained in the city of Caesarea Maritima (the city where Origen compiled it and also an important city in the New Testament) for hundreds of years. Many ancient scholars referenced it and used it for their own projects. Jerome, the translator of the Vulgate, wrote about how he used the text when translating the Vulgate.

    We don’t know exactly what happened to the Hexapla, but it seems that it was lost sometime in the early 600s during the wars between the Byzantines and the Persians and the Muslims.

    Anyhow, scholars have managed to reconstruct a decent chunk of the Hexapla by finding a couple small fragments, looking at quotations made by ancient historians, and especially by referencing translations like the “Syro-Hexapla” which translated parts of the Hexapla into other languages.

    Following is the general consensus about the six columns of the Hexapla.

    Column 1

    The first column simply contained the Hebrew text of the Old Testament. Nice and easy.

    As far as I can tell, there’s nothing especially interesting about the Hebrew text Origen used.

    Column 2

    The second column contained the Hebrew text transliterated into Greek letters.

    To give an example, an English transliteration of Greek would be like if I gave the Greek to John 1:1 as  Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ Λόγος and then gave the same Greek phrase using English letters instead of Greek letters: En archē ēn ho Logos.

    The purpose of this column was probably just to help people unfamiliar with Hebrew know how to pronounce the words. That’s just my speculation though.

    This column is usually known as the Secunda of Origen by scholars. Secunda is the Latin word for “second”. So, this refers to the “second” column of the Hexapla.

    Column 3

    Now, we finally get into a Greek translation of the Hebrew. The third column contains the translation made by Aquila of Sinope.

    Aquila’s translation is an extremely literal, word for word, translation of the Hebrew into Greek.

    It makes sense why the word for word translation would be placed right next to the Hebrew text columns.

    Column 4

    The fourth column is the Greek translation of Symmachus. This is a very “meaning for meaning” translation, like most of our modern English Bibles.

    Column 5

    This is the really important column. It’s a version of the Septuagint filled with notes and marks where Origen believes that the translation has diverged from the Hebrew.

    Since this was the column that ancient scholars copied and translated the most, it’s also the one that modern scholars have reconstructed best.

    Column 6

    Finally, there was the Greek translation of Theodotion. This was less so a translation and more so Theodotion fixing up the Septuagint to align more closely with the original Hebrew.

    Basically, Theodotion’s translation was a smaller attempt to do what Origen is doing with his Hexapla, to make the Septuagint a more faithful translation of the Hebrew.

    Final Notes

    There you have it. The Hexapla.

    Before summarizing everything we went over, though, I should also point out that there are some variations of Origen’s Hexapla.

    Apparently, Origen also made a Tetrapla (four-fold), which contained just the last four columns, no Hebrew.

    And, to complicate matters, several ancient writers, but especially Eusebius, tell us about how Origen used other translations as well for certain Books of the Old Testament. Because of this, sometimes the Hexapla is also called the Heptapla, Octapla, or Enneapla (seven-fold, eight-fold, or nine-fold).

    Eusebius writes a neat story about Origen finding another Hebrew manuscript in a clay jar outside of Jericho. Along with other translations, he apparently had a total of nine columns for the Book of Psalms.

    Some of that stuff is disputed, but most scholars can wholeheartedly agree on the existence of the six columns that we discussed above.

    Summary

    Anyhow, that covers the Hexapla of Origen. It was a MASSIVE work done by Origen in the early 200s AD where he laid out six (or more) columns of the Old Testament, two columns of Hebrew and four of Greek. The text was lost by the mid-600s AD. But, through extensive work, modern scholars have reconstructed what some of it might have looked like.

    That was a lot. I hope it helped you learn something new.

  • Selah

    In Psalm 3:2, we read:

    2 Many are saying of my soul,
    “There is no salvation for him in God.” Selah

    We’re interested specifically in that last word, Selah.

    It appears 71 times in the Book of Psalms, and 3 times in the Book of Habbakuk in a song-like section. So, the only times it appears in the Bible are in connection with songs.

    Plus, of the 39 psalms in the Book of Psalms that are written “for the music director”, 31 of them contain the word Selah at least once. Many take this to mean that it was a word associated with musical instruction, rather than part of a sentence.

    Well, what does the word mean?

    That’s the fun part. We don’t really know. Selah has been a very complex and confusing word among scholars for thousands of years.

    We know it’s a Hebrew word, but that’s about where the agreement ends. The meaning of this word was lost so long ago that we have records of Christian and Jewish scholars in the first few centuries giving different definitions.

    But, there are a number of pretty good guesses as to what it probably means. So, let’s dive in.

    1. Calah, To Measure

    Plenty of scholars connect the word Selah with the Hebrew word Calah, which means “to hang” or “to measure”. (The meaning of “to hang” would be like how an ancient merchant would “hang” something on a scale to measure its weight).

    This theory goes that if the term Selah has a meaning related to “measure”, then it is used as a way to tell the reader to carefully measure/weigh/consider what was just said.

    It would basically mean something along the lines of “Hey, pay attention to what you just read; it’s really important”.

    The Amplified Bible translates it as “pause, and calmly think of that”.

    2. Salal, To Lift Up

    One of the most common theories I’ve read was that Selah is related to the Hebrew word Salal, which means “to lift up” or “to praise”.

    The main idea with this theory is that Selah is acting as an instruction either to the people to “lift up” their voices and sing loudly/shout or as an instruction to the musicians to play louder, maybe by smashing cymbals at that moment or blowing trumpets.

    If it were a direction to the musicians, it would be similar to our modern musical instruction “fortissimo”, which is Italian for “very loud”.

    Either way, according to this theory, the musicians or the singers (whichever it was) would take a pause from singing or playing while the other one “lifted up” their noise and praise.

    This leads into the next theory.

    3. Salah/Shelah, To Pause

    A few people also say that the word Selah just comes outright from the Hebrew word meaning “pause”. (I found conflicting sources about what exactly that word was, either Salah or Shelah).

    Because of the actual spelling in Hebrew though, most scholars say that this etymology is unlikely. Still, it is similar to the first two theories because all three have the idea of pausing in some way.

    This theory is also backed up by the Ancient Greek translation of the Old Testament, the Septuagint. It translates Selah as Diapsalma (I’ve also seen the word called Daplasma in a couple articles). Diapsalma means, literally, “apart from the Psalm”. So, this at least lines up with the idea that Selah isn’t actually part of the writing itself. Some scholars use this to support the theory that it just means a pause.

    4. Section Break

    Another theory is just that Selah is a note letting you know that the topic is about to change. Most scholars don’t like this theory, especially because some Psalms end with the word Selah.

    Why would you say that the topic is about to change at the end of the song?

    Still, the theory tries to explain this away by saying that we only have fragments of some Psalms or that the Psalms were all meant to be read in order.

    5. Acronym

    This theory is that Selah is just an acronym of other Hebrew words.

    One Jewish tradition says that it stands for the phrase from Numbers 14:19 “Please forgive the sins of this people”.

    Most people don’t seem to like this theory too much either.

    6. Latin Semper, Always

    This theory is a touch complicated.

    When Jerome translated the Bible into Latin (called the Vulgate), he made one translation of each book, obviously…. except for the Book of Psalms.

    For Psalms, Jerome made three different translations, two from the Greek translation and one from the Ancient Hebrew.

    Plus, there are three different main versions of the Vulgate in existence today. And those versions are split between which of Jerome’s translations they use. Plus, the numbers of the Psalms don’t line up between English and Latin. For example, Psalm 3:2 is Psalm 3:3 in Latin, and Psalm 54:3 is Psalm 53:5 in Latin.

    So, all that to say, if you go looking for a Latin version of something in the Book of Psalms, be careful. It gets confusing and difficult really fast.

    Anyway, in Jerome’s translation from the Greek, he just uses the word Diapsalma, like in the Greek.

    But, in his translation from the Hebrew, he translates Selah as the Latin word Semper, which means “forever” or “always”.

    Aside from just Latin, several other ancient Jewish writings from the first few centuries after Christ say that the word Selah just means “forever”.

    Considering that all the other theories have to do with Selah being outside of the writing itself, this is a fun little theory. And since forever is such a versatile word, it could fit in place everywhere Selah appears.

    Conclusion

    In the end, Selah is a weird, confusing word. But, there are many scholars smarter than I who have studied this a whole bunch and have come up with the theories I listed above.

    I hope this helped you. Selah

  • The Onomasticon

    Have you ever heard of Josephus? He was a famous first century Jew who wrote a whole bunch of history books about the Middle East and the Holy Land.

    Much of what we know about the world that Jesus grew up in comes from Josephus. He was one of the most important historians when it comes to us learning about the Intertestamental Period (the time between the end of the Old Testament and the birth of Jesus).

    Well, like Josephus, the Christian historian Eusebius is the main reason why we know so much about the first three centuries of the church.

    For this reason, Eusebius is commonly called “the father of church history”.

    One of his most famous works is something called the Onomasticon. This is from a Greek word meaning “place names”. It’s where we get the English word “onomastic”, which means “relating to a name”.

    The full name of Eusebius’ work was “On The Place Names In The Holy Scripture”. It is a big list briefly describing a lot of the places mentioned in the Old Testament and the Gospels.

    Scholars call this kind of book “a gazetteer”. It’s like a dictionary for place names.

    For example, in the Onomasticon, this is Eusebius’ entry for the word “Bethsaida”:

    Bēthsaida

     City of “Andrew and Peter” and Philipp (the apostles). Located in Galilee on (near) the Lake of Gennesareth.

    Some entries are even shorter, like:

    Amam

     (In) the tribe of Juda.

    There are also longer, more in-depth entries, but most are short.

    In total, there are about 985 entries in the Onomasticon.

    Originally, it seems that Onomasticon was the fourth part of a four part series of works by Eusebius, all detailing the geography of the Holy Land. However, the first three works are lost. The only one that survived, more or less intact, was the Onomasticon.

    One of the other three parts was probably just giving the Greek version of the Hebrew place names. Another was a description of the geography of the tribes in Ancient Judea. And the third one was about the layout of Jerusalem.

    Date

    Now, we don’t know for sure when Eusebius wrote this book. But, most people think it was probably around 325 AD, plus or minus a few years.

    Latin

    A few decades after Eusebius died, Jerome (the man who compiled the Latin translation of the Bible, called the Vulgate) decided to translate the Onomasticon from Greek into Latin.

    Jerome did this probably about 388 AD or so.

    In Latin, he changed the title to “Book on the Sites and Names of the Places of the Hebrews”. He also added some entries and did some light editing of Eusebius’ work.

    Nowadays, “Onomasticon” can be a general term to talk about a gazetteer, a list of names.

  • What Are The Beatitudes?

    Jesus started His Sermon on the Mount by calling several different groups of people blessed. We typically call this section of His teaching “the beatitudes”.

    But why?

    Well, in Matthew 5:3-11, in our English translations, He starts every sentence with the word “blessed”. In the Latin translation of the New Testament (the Vulgate), the word used is beati.

    From this Latin word, beati, we get the word “beatitude”, which we use to talk about this short passage.

    Well, what does beati mean?

    “Blessed” is certainly a good translation in the context of this passage. But, the more common translation of the Latin word is “happy” or “fortunate”.

    In fact, when the word “beatitude” first entered the English language, it could just mean “supreme happiness”. However, it very quickly developed a purely religious context.

    From beatus (another form of the word beati), we also get the name “Beatrice”. Naming your daughter Beatrice would be like naming your son Felix (felix is another Latin word for “happy”).

    And, even though the Sermon on the Mount was originally written in Greek, it seems that the Greek word used, makarios, could similarly mean “happy” or “blessed”.

  • Eucharist

    “Eucharist” is another name for the Lord’s Supper, also known as Communion.

    It comes from the Greek word eukharistia (εὐχαριστέω), which literally means “thankfulness” or “gratitude”.

    This refers back to what actually happened during the Last Supper (Luke 22:17-19):

    “17 And when He had taken a cup and given thanks (eucharistēsas), He said, “Take this and share it among yourselves…19 And when He had taken some bread and given thanks (eucharistēsas), He broke it and gave it to them, saying…”

    So, the Lord’s Supper is a “giving thanks” meal. And that’s why the term Eucharist is commonly used to describe it.

    Plus, as a fun language tidbit, the modern Greek language gets a word from this. The Greek word Eυχαριστώ (pronounced something like “ef-ha-ree-sto”) means “thank you”.

    If you’re ever in Greece and want to tell someone thank you, just remember the word “Eucharist” and try to say it with a Greek accent. You’ll probably end up with something close to “ef-ha-ree-sto”.

  • Grammatical Error In The KJV?

    In Matthew 16:13, the King James Version reads:

    13 When Jesus came into the coasts of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, saying, Whom do men say that I the Son of man am?

    This is clearly different from other English translations, such as the NIV:

    13 When Jesus came to the region of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, “Who do people say the Son of Man is?”

    The major difference is that the KJV uses the word “whom”, while every other English translation (including the New King James Version) uses “who”.

    Who vs. Whom

    Now, if you’re like most people, you’ve got no clue when to actually use “whom” in a sentence, and you probably don’t really care.

    So, to give you a really easy way to figure it out, there’s one quick little test you can use.

    If you can restructure the question as a statement, using the word “he”, then the correct word is “who”. And if you can use the word “him”, then “whom” is correct.

    As an example:

    You can look at the sentence “Who said that?”. We can rephrase it as a statement: “He said that.”, so the word “who” is correct in that sentence.

    Then, we can look at the sentence “Whom did he hit?”. We can rephrase that as “He hit him.”, so the word “whom” is correct.

    If you want to get into the fancy grammar terminology, this is because “who” is in the subjective case, and “whom” is in the objective case.

    Whom in the KJV

    So, back to the KJV.

    Let’s apply this quick test we just learned to the translation of Jesus’ question in the KJV.

    “Whom do men say that I the Son of man am?”

    First, let’s just drop out the appositive, “Son of man”, to make this sentence a bit easier to handle:

    “Whom do men say that I am?”

    We can restructure this sentence as “Men say that I am he.” (If you’re confused about why it’s correct to say “I am he” but not “I am him”, just trust me on it. It’s due to something called a “predicate adjective”, which has to match the subject in case.)

    Well, according to our test, since “he” works in the sentence but not “him”, we should use the word “who”.

    So, why does the KJV say “whom” when that’s grammatically incorrect?

    Pretty much, in some other languages, including Greek and Latin, there’s something called the “accusative plus the infinitive”. This is a grammar rule that sounds very foreign in English but is entirely normal in Latin and Greek.

    To give you an example of how the “accusative plus the infinitive” works, look at the two following English sentences:

    (normal sentence) “Who do men say that I am?”

    (accusative plus the infinitive) “Whom do men say me to be?”

    In the original Greek, a literal translation would look closer to the second option. And, this would fit with our rule from before because we could reword it as “Men say him to be…” It sounds really weird in English, but it technically is grammatically correct.

    So, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word “whom” could sometimes be used in the way that the KJV uses it, because of influence from both Latin and Greek. Specifically, it says that the use of whom is a “partial imitation of the accusative [plus the] infinitive construction in the biblical source”.

    And Matthew 16:13 is not the only place that the King James Version uses whom like this. You can also find it in places like Mark 8:27 and Luke 9:20.

    In the end, it is technically a grammar error to use whom in the way shown in the KJV. But, it seems like it was an intentional error, where they just wanted to give a weird sounding, somewhat literal translation.

  • What Is The Septuagint?

    You’ve likely heard about the Septuagint before. But what is it?

    Well, it’s the Greek translation of the Old Testament.

    Back when Alexander the Great was off conquering the known world, he didn’t neglect to seize the region of Israel. In the years following Alexander the Great’s death, his generals set up their own kingdoms.

    One of these kingdoms was the Ptolemaic Kingdom. It controlled much of Egypt and the territory of Israel. But remember, this new kingdom was ruled by Greeks, the descendants of Alexander the Great’s generals and officers.

    So, as this kingdom grew, the Greek language became more and more important in the area, even for the local Jewish population.

    Soon enough, the Greek-speaking Jews had a problem: they wanted to worship God and read the Holy Scriptures, but they couldn’t. The Scriptures were all in Hebrew, not Greek.

    Now, there is a very famous story about what happened next. I’ll explain this story, but just know: this is almost certainly hyperbole or even outright fiction.

    The story goes like this. King of Egypt, Ptolemy II Philadelphus, son of one of Alexander’s generals, was consulting with the chief librarian at the Library of Alexandria. This librarian asked Ptolemy to send for some Jews from Jerusalem who could translate the Old Testament (not yet called the Old Testament) from Hebrew into Greek. So, Ptolemy did just that.

    Once the Jews heard the request, they selected from amongst themselves six men from each of the twelve tribes. Then, these 72 men (6 X 12 = 72) headed off to Alexandria in Egypt. When they arrived, Ptolemy separated each of the men into separate rooms and asked each one to translate the Torah into Greek (i.e. Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy).

    And as the story goes, each of these 72 men completed their work in exactly 72 days, and every single translation was entirely identical.

    It is for this reason that we call the Greek translation of the Old Testament the “Septuagint”, from the Latin word septuaginta, which means “seventy”. This is in reference to the 72 scholars who completed their work in 72 days. (And yes, apparently whoever started calling it the Septuagint just decided to round 72 down to 70 to make it sound nicer).

    Again, that is the story told about what happened. Is it true? Probably not. Is it partly true? Possibly.

    What we do know for sure is that the Septuagint first came about in the 3rd century BC. As far as we can tell, this was the first ever major attempt to translate the Scriptures (or any religious text for that matter) into another language.

    Due to lots of different reasons, the early church relied heavily on the Septuagint instead of the original Hebrew Scriptures. This makes sense because many early Christians were Greek-speaking Gentiles.

    In fact, when Jerome was translating the Bible into Latin in the late 300s AD, it was very surprising that he translated straight from the Hebrew into Latin. Most translators of the time saw the Septuagint as an equally inspired work of God, so they translated from the Greek into Latin.

    Overall, the Septuagint is just the general name for any ancient copy of the Old Testament that is in Greek. It’s got a fun story behind the name (septuaginta = 70). And it was the most common translation of the Old Testament for the first few centuries of the church.

  • Why Is The Word Angel In EvANGELism?

    We often hear words that have religious ideas connected to them. So, it becomes easy to just hear words like “Evangelism” or “Messiah” or “Gospel” and pass right on over them without thinking on what they actually mean.

    One great example has to do with the word “evangelism”.

    Evangelism means “the act of spreading the Gospel”.

    But, have you ever noticed the word “angel” in “evANGELism”? Well, the two words are indeed related.

    What a lot of people don’t realize is that we get the word “angel” from the Greek word angelos, which just means “messenger”. So, whenever we see a reference to an “angel” in the Bible, the translators just decided to not actually translate the word; it really means a messenger. In fact, when we do see the word “messenger” in our Bibles, it is the exact same Greek word: angelos (or the Hebrew mal’akh for the Old Testament).

    Alright, so “angel” is just the word “messenger”. How does that help us?

    Well, the word “evangelism” comes from two Greek words: eu, meaning “good” and angellein (the verb form of angelos), which means “to bring a message” or “to announce news”.

    So, to evangelize is literally to bring good news.

    And, if we’re using the proper Greek terms, we are called to be angels (messengers) of the evangel (an old English word for the good news/Gospel).

  • Why Do Certain Numbers Mean Words In The Bible? Thanks To Gematria And Isopsephy.

    You’ve probably heard about some famous examples of numbers being used as codes in the Bible. Specifically, you’ve likely heard that the number 666 was probably a reference to the Emperor Nero.

    But why on earth do numbers mean words? And how does this “code” work?

    Well, a lot of people try to make it sound all complicated, but it’s actually pretty simple.

    In English, we obviously use a certain system of numbers (also called numerals): 1,2,3,4,etc.

    What you may not know is that these numbers (1,2,3,4,etc.) are Arabic numerals. A system of numbers that comes to us from Arabic.

    So, before we began using these Arabic numerals just a few centuries ago, what did we use?

    Well, think back to the Romans. They had a system of Roman numerals (ring a bell?). In this system, the Romans used numbers such as I,V,X,L,C,etc.

    As you can see, all of their numbers were just letters. The only way to tell whether something in writing was meant as letters or numbers was through context. If you saw V CANES, you could assume that the “V” represents “5”, so you could translate the phrase as “5 dogs”.

    This system of Roman numerals is very similar to what the Greeks and Hebrews did.

    Records are unclear, but it appears that the Greeks were the first to develop this system of counting (using their letters to represent numbers instead of spelling out the full name of the number).

    The Greeks called this “isopsephy”, which comes from isos, meaning “equal” and psephos, meaning “count”.

    Then, it appears that following Alexander the Great’s conquest of the east, the new Hellenistic (hellenistic just means Greek) Jews began to develop their own system of isopsephy.

    However, just to keep us a little bit confused, the Hebrews made sure to change the name of isopsephy to “gematria”. Gematria still comes from Greek, but specifically it derives from the word geometria, which is also where we get our word “geometry”. It’s basically just a word that had to do with math, so naming a number system after a math word makes sense.

    So, these systems of isopsephy (for Greek) and gematria (for Hebrew) were pretty much just the same sort of thing as Roman numerals.

    The only big difference is that for the Romans, only a few letters were used as numbers and the rest were always just letters. For Hebrew and Greek though, every letter had a numerical value to go along with it.

    Because of this, you could take any word in Hebrew or Greek, add up all the numbers/letters, and get a total value. This was done pretty commonly for different purposes. Again, the famous example of 666 alludes to Emperor Nero because if you add up the letters of his name in Greek, Neron Kaisar, you get 666.

    Overall, a lot of people like to make this stuff sound all confusing, but just remember, it’s pretty much the same as Roman numerals.

  • What Is The Decapolis?

    We see the word “Decapolis” three times in our Bibles (all in The New Testament), Matthew 4:25, Mark 5:20, and Mark 7:31. But, what on earth is it?

    Well, the word comes from the Greek deka, meaning “ten” and the Greek polis, meaning “city”. So, the Decapolis is the region of ten cities.

    Now, from the reading that I’ve done, it seems that we don’t exactly have the best records for what the Decapolis fully was. But, I’ll go ahead and piece it together as best as I can.

    Pretty much, at the time of Christ, the Decapolis referred to a region mostly east of the Jordan River. There were a total of ten cities (although maybe more than ten) that all were part of the Roman Empire but had been granted a large degree of independence.

    Only one city in the Decapolis was west of the Jordan River. Scythopolis. It was apparently one of the richest and most powerful of the cities.

    And while most of the cities were all more or less in the same region, Damascus was located a good deal further north than the rest.

    There are also conflicting reports of which cities were actually part of the Decapolis. Some resources that I saw said there may have been as many as 18 cities in the Decapolis at some points. It did at least originally refer to just ten cities though (as the name deka polis would have us believe).

    But, was “Decapolis” just a description of that general region, or was it the name for a political alliance or confederation between these ten cities? I have got no clue. Some sources say that it might have been an economic alliance between these rich cities. Others speculate that it was an actual political union. And others still guess that it was just a geographical name with no real significance to how the cities worked together.

    Even though we don’t know too much about how the Decapolis region actually operated, we do know a bit more about its history.

    After the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC, there were a few new Greek Empires across the Middle East. Over the course of the next couple centuries, these empires founded most of the cities that would later become the Decapolis region.

    Then, in 63 BC Pompey the Great (a famous Roman general) came and conquered a decent chunk of the Middle East. By the time that Pompey came around, the Decapolis region (which was still mainly populated and influenced by Greeks) had become conquered by a new Jewish Kingdom.

    So, Pompey came and effectively liberated the Decapolis. He granted several cities (maybe ten in total) a large degree of independence from Rome. They were on the extreme border of the Roman Empire at the time, and the cities were all apparently very happy to be in charge of themselves again. In fact, I read several sources describing them as city-states. They even had permission from the Romans to mint their own coins.

    Since these cities still kept such a strong Greek influence, that can explain one very well known story in The New Testament. When Jesus crossed over the Sea of Galilee into the “region of the Gerasenes” (Mark 5:1), He’d entered the Decapolis. The city of Gerasa (from whom the Gerasenes get their name) was another city-state within the Decapolis. And when Jesus at the end of the encounter with the “Garasene Demoniac” casts the demons into a giant herd of pigs, did you ever wonder why there were pigs? Remember, the Jews considered pigs unclean. Well, they were in a Gentile region, the Decapolis. So, these pagans didn’t care much about Jewish dietary law, and they kept plenty of pigs.

    From what I can tell, we just don’t have too much information about the Decapolis. But, to sum it all up, it seems that it was a region of at least ten autonomous city-states which were established by Pompey the Great in 63 BC. They were mostly Greeks/Gentiles. And they maintained their wealth and semi-independence until around 106 AD.

    I hope that helps.