Place · Region
Decapolis
Named in 3 verses across 2 books, first in Matthew 4:25.
In the Bible
All 3 verses, in Bible order. Text from the Berean Standard Bible; verse numbers follow the KJV.
Matthew
- Matthew 4:25
The large crowds that followed Him came from Galilee, the Decapolis, Jerusalem, Judea, and beyond the Jordan.
Mark
Events here
Events the dataset sets at Decapolis. Dates follow its Ussher–Jones reckoning (one of several traditional counts), not established history.
- c. AD 29Feeding of Four Thousand
- c. AD 29Healing a Crowd near Sea of Galilee
Dictionary
From Easton’s Bible Dictionary (1897), as attached to this record by Theographic. Its geography and “modern” descriptions date from the 1890s. Easton wrote in 1897, and some of his views are now debated.
Read Easton’s entry
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.”