Gadarene swine

English

Noun

Gadarene swine pl (plural only)

1. (biblical) A herd of swine that become possessed by demons after the latter are exorcised from men, in a parable told in each of the Synoptic Gospels, although not the Gospel of John.
   • 2000 [1908, Weiser Books], R. Campbell Thompson, Semitic Magic: Its Origins and Development, Red Wheel/Weiser, page 208,

     The most remarkable parallel to this spell is contained in the New Testament story of the Gadarene swine.

   • 2005, Sverre Lyngstad, Knut Hamsun, Novelist: A Critical Assessment, Peter Lang, page 294:

     In fact, Hamsun now completes his allusion to the story of the Gadarene swine alluded to by Pauline in the previous novel. That the reader is expected to recall the Biblical story is quite evident from one simple fact: the number of sheep, according to August's rough reckoning, is "over two thousand"; the herd of Gadarene swine numbered "about two thousand."

   • 2006, Michael Marais, “4: Death and the Space of the Response to the Other in J. M. Coetzee's Master of Petersburg”, in Jane Poyner, editor, J. M. Coetzee and the Idea of the Public Intellectual, Ohio University Press, page 87:

     Here Dostoevsky uses the biblical story of the Gadarene swine—a tale of unclean devils that, having been exorcised from a sick or mad man by Christ, enter a herd of swine that then rushes headlong down a steep bank into the sea (Mark 5:2-20)—to generate a series of analogies that suggest that Russia is a sick or mad man possessed by devils and that the swine that the devils enter upon being exorcised are the revolutionaries (Devils, 647–48). In The Master of Petersburg, however, Coetzee applies the story of the Gadarene swine not only to Russia and the phenomenon of revolutionary nihilism but also to the character Dostoevsky himself.

Further reading

• Exorcism of the Gerasene demoniac on Wikipedia.Wikipedia