A Hellenistic city of the DECAPOLIS, on the heights south-east of the Sea of Galilee (modern Umm Qais in Jordan) — Greek-speaking, with a theatre and colonnaded streets, and famous enough to have produced philosophers and poets. Its territory apparently reached down toward the lake, which is what 'the region of the Gadarenes' means. ⚠ The name is one of the New Testament's best-known textual knots, and the geography is why: GADARA sits about six miles from the shore and GERASA a good thirty, and neither is a lakeside town with a cliff running into the water. The manuscripts differ across all three Gospels; the earliest witnesses of Matthew read Gadarenes (which this translation prints), while much of the later tradition reads GERGESENES — a name Origen argued for in the third century precisely because he knew the other two did not fit the terrain. Both a scribal correction toward plausible geography and an original local name remain live options; what can be said is that the difficulty was noticed early and argued about honestly. ⚠ The herd of pigs in the story is itself a piece of geography: unclean animals grazing in quantity mean Gentile country.