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Places of the Bible

Decapolis

Region · region

What happened here

  • Feeding of Four Thousand · 29 AD
  • Healing a Crowd near Sea of Galilee · 29 AD

Where the name appears

Events told in passages that name Decapolis, and how many of their verses do. That is not the same as saying they happened here: a place can be named as a landmark, as somewhere being travelled to, or as the subject of a prophecy.

  • Gadarene Demoniacs · 28 AD · 1 verse
  • Jesus' 1st Tour of Galilee · 28 AD · 1 verse

Easton’s Bible Dictionary

Ten cities=deka, ten, and polis, a city, a district on the east and south-east of the Sea of Galilee containing “ten cities,” which were chiefly inhabited by Greeks. It included a portion of Bashan and Gilead, and is mentioned three times in the New Testament (Matt. 4:25; Mark 5:20; 7:31). These cities were Scythopolis, i.e., “city of the Scythians”, (ancient Bethshean, the only one of the ten cities on the west of Jordan), Hippos, Gadara, Pella (to which the Christians fled just before the destruction of Jerusalem), Philadelphia (ancient Rabbath-ammon), Gerasa, Dion, Canatha, Raphana, and Damascus. When the Romans conquered Syria (B.C. 65) they rebuilt, and endowed with certain privileges, these “ten cities,” and the province connected with them they called “Decapolis.”

From M. G. Easton, Illustrated Bible Dictionary (1893), in the public domain.

Named in 3 verses

Matthew
4:25
Mark
5:20, 7:31

The place, its people and its events come from Theographic, a knowledge graph of the Bible by Robert Rouse, used and shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.