Mark is not alone in using
military language to refer to the demonic. Unholy forces are described
militarily in other texts of the Second Temple period, such as the kittim
of the Dead Sea Scrolls’ War Scroll and the watchers of 1 Enoch. The impulse to
read these as inherently anti-occupation must be tempered with the observation
that holy supernatural beings are often described similarly in early
Christian and Second Temple Jewish literature. The reference to the twelve
legions of angels at Jesus’ command (Matt. 26:53) and the heavenly host
praising God (Luke 2:13-15) are hardly exceptional, since angels were regularly
described in such terms by Second Temple Jewish authors. Not only do Michael
and other angels perform military functions in numerous texts (e.g., War
Scroll; 1 En.; Sib. Or. 2.214-237; LAE 40; 3 Bar. 4:7), but military
terminology is regularly used to describe the hierarchal organization of
angels. (Aleksander R. Michalak, Angels as Warriors in -Late Second Temple
Jewish Literature WUNT [Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2012], passim, esp. 86-98)
For instance, God commands the angels to “gather before him, each according to
his rank” in LAE 38.2. Philo assumes angels are organized into military ranks (Conf.
34.174), and the same can be said of various texts from Qumran (e.g., 4Q405,
4Q503). Arnal and McCutcheon suggest that “the fading presence of God in the
early gospel literature must simply reflect the widespread distancing of deity
in the Hellenistic and Roman periods . . . corresponding to the imperial
distancing of centers of power and governance.” (Arnal and McCuthecon, Sacred
Is the Profane, 164) One witnesses an increase in the activity of divine
delegates and functionaries during this period—angels, demons, and sons of God
in Jewish literature—to mediate for an increasingly distant deity. As Arnal and
McCutheon imply, biblical conceptions of divine action are mediated by the
author’s experiences with terrestrial authorities, so the theological exchange
of deities for lesser angels was partially shaped by similar shifts in
administration-by-proxy under Greek and Roman Empires. Thus, while early Jewish
literature imagined the Lord directly participating in battle against Israel’s
enemies (e.g., Josh. 10; Ps. 18:8-16), late Second Temple Jewish literature
largely exchanges the Lord’s personal involvement for his functionaries’
activity (e.g., 2 Macc. 15:22-23, Dan. 10:10-13). To be sure, angels acted as
the Lord’s soldiers in earlier Jewish literature, but the shift of emphasis is
clear and mirrors the changing role of heads-of-state with respect to warfare
in the Near East. It is entirely predictable that the operation of the demonic
would be understood similarly.
This scheme of otherworldly proxy
and delegation sees fruition in the Gerasene Demoniac. The pericope understands
Roman legions as the most proximate functionaries of governmental power, and in
turn represent the most proximate functionaries of supernatural power. This
reading must be nonpolemical, since the Lord had his own legion of angels, as
implied in Mark 8:38 and 13:24-27; the former imagines an imperial procession
from in the heavens and the latter implies numerous angels at the son of man’s
command. Mark made use of the language available to him to describe both demons
and the son of man’s angels, doing so via military imagery. The interpretation
proposed here, to tweak that of Pheme Perkins, suggests that the passage
compares the demons to the Roman army, not vice versa. (Pheme Perkins, “The
Gospel of Mark: Introduction, Commentary and Reflections,” in New
Interpreters Bible [Nashville: Abingdon, 1995], 8:584-) The present
interpretation avoids the problem with garrison placement that comes with
anti-military-oppression interpretation. Mark’s word legio need not
relate to legio X Fretensis specifically, but probably treats legions in
general as a type of power-by-proxy. Thus, as elsewhere in Mark, ordinary
people never encounter Satan—the ruler of demons (3:22)—directly, but only his
functionaries. (Christopher B. Zeichmann, The Roman Army and the New
Testament [Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2018], 56-57)
