A discussion on the language of demons

A couple days ago I started exploring the language of ha satan (literally: the accuser). I started by exploring the 3 places (only 3) where this language appears tied to a character in the Hebrew Bible (here is that post), and then I moved on to discuss a well-known story about Satan in the New Testament (here is that post). I plan to do a 3rd Satan-themed post regarding Revelation, but I thought I'd take a little detour and discuss demons.

But I want to start by discussing language. There have been those who have responded to my posts by arguing that I should not take the satan language metaphorically. But, I would argue, all language is metaphorical. If you do not understand that, you do not understand how communication works. You see, we are not telepathic - we are not capable of directly transmitting our thoughts to others. When we want to describe something we have seen to another person, we cannot transmit the exact image we have seen to them - we have to encode this image into either sounds (which make up what we think of as words) or symbols drawn on a page (which make up what we think of as words). And when our audience receives these codified messages, there is no guarantee that when they decode them, the image that they see in their own minds will look anything like the image we were trying to get them to see.

I love the way Bible scholar Dan McClellan illustrates this point. He often tells a story about studying at Oxford as an American. And one day, he was hungry and happened to see a KFC (Kentucky Fried Chicken). This was a welcome sight to him as it reminded him of home, and so he walked in and said "y'all have any biscuits here?" And the poor lad behind the counter looked at him, very confused, and said "why would we have biscuits?" And then Dan remembered: in England, the word "biscuits" codifies what Dan would have called "cookies". So after this realization, he had to think about how he could communicate what he wanted using words like "fluffy", "warm", "buttery", "flaky", etc. I've heard Dan tell this story in a few of his videos, one of them being his TED talk.

So, while this is somewhat out of order, I want to start thinking about "demons" by going to I John 4:18, which says "There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear." I find this very interesting, because this is the same language to talk about demons. The verse says that love casts out fear - the Greek is exō ballei, and is very similar to a case in Mark 16:17 when uses a grammatical form of this - ekbalousin - to describe casting out demons.

I want you to think about how we use language about demons metaphorically in today's culture. Have you ever seen someone hitting a punching bag vigorously and said "oh, he must be wrestling with some demons"? In a case like that, we aren't imagining separate personalities that the man is literally fighting - we are just describing a man who is taking out anger at other things that have happened in his life on a punching bag. And I think that when I John 4:18 says that love "casts out fear", it encourages us to think about demons metaphorically as the way negative emotions play out in our lives.

I also want you to think about how so much of the way many Christians think of Satan and demons does not cast out fear, but encourages it.

Now I'd like to examine two stories about demons in the New Testament. The first story, I will argue, is not a case where the story-teller is thinking about demons metaphorically, but is an example where we see how ancient people were wrong. You see, in the ancient world, they did not understand modern medicine. They didn't have a concept of microscopic life (they didn't even have microscopes), and as a result, they lived in a demon-infested world. Ailments that we now understand as germs, diseases, infections, or genetic conditions were thought of as the results of being tormented by demons. We now know that this is wrong. And we see an example of this in Matthew 17:14-23, where it says that a man brought his son to Jesus, describing him thrashing around and even falling into fire and water. Some translations actually use the word epilepsy here, and I think it is useful to understand that the very word "epilepsy" comes from the Greek word epilambanein - which means "to seize". You see, they didn't have an understanding of the disease of epilepsy - they didn't even know what a brain was. And so we see in this passage that they blame this on a demon. When they saw someone having an epileptic seizure, they thought it was a demon seizing them - the word itself communicates this. And we now know that they were wrong. But Jesus doesn't try to teach them modern science in this story - he doesn't try to teach them about the central nervous system and the brain and cells and all of that. He just heals him. So while I would not argue that in this case, the writer thought of demons metaphorically here, I would encourage modern readers to think of them that way, with the understanding that the original writer had limited understanding.

But there is another story that I would argue takes a metaphorical approach to demons. This is the story of the Geresene demoniac, which is found in Mark 5:1-20 and in Luke 8:26-39. Now, note something interesting here - Matthew transforms this story in a story about two demon-possessed men in Matthew 8:28-34, and this is a contradiction, but this is what happens with stories: stories change depending on who is telling them, and that's ok, because the point of this story isn't that it happened, but that it is trying to tell us something metaphorically. You see, I really want you to try to put yourself into that time period and think about what it means when Jesus asks in Mark 5:8 and Luke 8:30: "what is your name", and the demon responds "my name is Legion." I'd like you to imagine this as a more modern story - try to imagine a figure like Martin Luther King or Ghandi living in a time when there is no modern news structure. We don't have newspapers, or television, or radio. And so people tell stories about people like MLK and Ghandi. And try to imagine a story where MLK goes to Vietnam, meets a demon-possessed man, asks "what is your name", and the demon replies "my name is Napalm." Or imagine Ghandi going to Afghanistan (don't worry about the timeline, that's not important), meets a demon-possessed man, asks "what is your name", and the demon responds "my name is Drone-Strike." I want you to think about how politically charged this is when the demon identifies itself as Legion, the name of a company of Roman soldiers.

And the nearby city of Decapolis was home to one of Rome's largest Legions. Not only that, but we know that Legions often had a symbol for the particular legion, and the symbol for Decapolis' Legion was a boar's head. This makes the fact that Jesus casts Legion into a herd of pigs an interesting fact.

But to take it further, there are linguistic things that happen that English readers don't catch. First off, it says that the demons are cast into a herd of pigs - pigs don't herd. If they are owned by someone, they are penned in. If they are in the wild, you might see a couple of them together, but you won't see a "herd" because pigs don't herd. But something interesting starts to happen here - the word for "herd" here is agelē. We have this entry on the word in Wikipedia, which says that it was "an assembly or group of young men in ancient Crete, forming a significant part of their social and military life." It was a structure in which young men were trained as soldiers.

Furthermore, when the agelē of pigs goes off the cliff, there are two interesting words used. One is when Jesus gives the "herd" permission - he uses a word which can also be used to describe a commanding officer dismissing his soldiers: epetrepsen. And then the word used to describe the pigs movement into the sea (oremesen) is a word which describes military charging in an attack. So we have repeated allusions to military here in reference to this demon.

But there is something very interesting about this scene - there is no cliff anywhere near that part of the sea.  Are we to surmise that the gospel writers were ignorant of their geography?  Or, could they have deliberately chosen a symbolic image to communicate spiritual truths?

Being driven off a cliff is the sacrificial ritual for disposing of a scapegoat.  But in this scene, the scapegoat ritual is not carried out - it is not a scapegoat forced off the cliff, but the Legion itself, along with the real "sins" of that society, which are symbolically represented by the pigs: the symbol of their oppressors.  It's almost as if Jesus is forcing the Gerasenes to face the real issues they’ve been repressing by removing their ability to effectively scapegoat this man any longer! 

What we have here is not the account of a literal historical event, but a symbolic story that has Jesus taking the society's chosen scapegoat - a mentally unstable man - and casting out his "demons" into the real problems that this society faces - the military oppression of the empire of Rome. The story is not telling us to believe in literal invisible beings that oppress us, but telling us to face the real problems in our lives - in this case, the oppression of the Roman empire.