daimonizomai

Every major lexicon converges on the gloss "be possessed by a demon" (BDAG; Louw-Nida 12.41; LSJ sense III, documented from the NT itself, Plutarch Quaest. conv. 706D, and Aretaeus on epilepsy). Morphologically it is a denominative media tantum on δαίμων: the middle-passive marks the subject as the patient, one acted upon, exactly parallel to σεληνιάζομαι and παραλύομαι, which Matt 4:24 strings alongside it; the verb itself is silent about indwelling, which is supplied by the narrative vocabulary (εἰσέρχομαι, ἐξέρχομαι, ἐκβάλλω). Werner Foerster's TDNT article established the standard framework and noted the NT preference for the diminutive δαιμόνιον over the philosophically loaded δαίμων. The verb is essentially absent from the LXX (a lone reading attributed to Aquila at Ps 90:6) and rare before the NT, which effectively makes it a Christian technical term built on a demonologized noun. Twelftree treats δαιμονίζομαι, ἔχειν δαιμόνιον, and πνεῦμα ἀκάθαρτον as functionally synonymous in the Synoptics, while Marcus, Yarbro Collins, and Sorensen read Mark's preference for πνεῦμα ἀκάθαρτον as a deliberate purity-register antithesis to the πνεῦμα ἅγιον; Matthew (who favors this verb as a near-clinical label) and Luke pull toward the more Hellenistic pole. The nature of the state is debated three ways: the theological-realist school (Twelftree, Arnold, Page, Ferguson, Keener) reads real personal agency presupposed by the exorcism syntax; the anthropological-relativist school (Pilch, Malina, Davies) reads a culturally coded illness or altered state; the sociopolitical reading (Hollenbach, Myers) treats the Gerasene Λεγιών as the colonized self. The σεληνιάζομαι crux (Matt 17:15) tests whether ancients drew our line between epilepsy and possession: Davies and Allison, Hagner, and Carter read "lunacy/epilepsy," while France objects on lexical grounds that σεληνιάζομαι was not the clinical epilepsy term then available.