of pigs, as there certainly wouldn’t have been if the inhabitants had been living as good, law-abiding Jews, who of course didn’t eat pork. There is an implicit challenge here: the story is an acted parable not only of cleansing the land of pagan pollution in the form of the Romans and their legions, but also, perhaps, of cleansing the land from the internal pollution of those who were sitting light to the ancestral codes (though this then stands in some tension with Mark 7, as we shall see). Underneath