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GERASA

(Gk. Gerasa)

A Decapolis city in the late Hellenistic and Roman periods, modern Jerash located on the Transjordanian plateau just N of the Jabbok River (Nahr ez-Zarqa; Gen. 32:22).

Stone Age remains and walled Early to Middle Bronze settlements were found in the area. The main city of Gerasa, founded after the conquest of Alexander the Great, continued under the Ptolemies as a city of the Decapolis (Pliny Nat. hist. 5.74), and then under Seleucid rule (Antiochus III, 223-187; Antiochus IV, 175) when Gerasa became known as Antiochia ad Chrysorhoam (Antioch on the Chrysorhoas River). Later conquered by Alexander Janneus (102-67 b.c.), the city was taken over by the Romans (63) and then reached its zenith in the 2nd century a.d.

Gerasa profited from being on the lucrative spice and perfume north-south trade route between Mesopotamia, Palmyra, Damascus, Abila, and Capitalias, on to Petra and southern Arabia, and also prospered from being on a branch of the Via Triana Nova, linking with Pella, and also on routes linking the city with Judea, Galilee, and Phoenicia.

Gerasa, in Roman fashion, had a north-south Cardo Maximus, and two east-west Decumani (all colonnaded), with intersecting central tetrapylons, the one Decumanus on the south near the forum, the south theater, the temple of Zeus, a Hellenistic temple, and a soldiers’ barracks, and the other Decumanus on the north, near the north theater and the western baths.

Other important archaeological remains include, to the west of the Cardo Maximus and between the two Decumani, the precinct and temple of Artemis, the nymphaeum, and a series of Byzantine church ruins.

On the south of the city are the hippodrome and Hadrian’s arch, the latter commemorating the emperor’s visit to the city in a.d. 129.

Bibliography. S. Applebaum and A. Segal, “Gerasa,” NEAEHL 2:470-79; J. Finegan, The Archaeology of the New Testament, rev. ed. (Princeton, 1992); C. H. Kraeling, Gerasa, City of the Decapolis (New Haven, 1938); T. C. Mitchell, “Gerasa,” in The Illustrated Bible Dictionary, ed. J. D. Douglas (Wheaton, 1980), 1:552-53.

See Gerasenes.

W. Harold Mare