For my first exegesis paper in the doctoral program at Concordia, I decided to tackle Ezekiel’s prophecy about Gog in Ezekiel 38. I wanted to critically examine the claims about this passage made in Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth. My Missouri Synod Lutheran professor, Dr Raabe, chided me for being too literalist (!) in my suggestion that parts of this passage may yet await a future earthly fulfillment.
Who is Gog? One possibility is that Gog is a mythologized larger-than-life version of the deceased Lydian king Gyges (Akkadian Gugu) of the seventh century BC, possibly being identified with his great-grandson Alyttas, who ruled Lydia in Ezekiel’s day. The northern Gagaya people named in the Late Bronze Amarna letters (1:36-40) have also been ventured as a possibility. The most attractive possibility is that Gog is a personification of “Darkness”, with gug being the Sumerian word for darkness.
But who is Magog? This nation is named nowhere else in antiquity before the time of Ezekiel except in Genesis 10:2. The name is either a contraction of an Akkadian mat-Gugu (“land of Gog”), or (more likely) is a simple Semitic substantive form derived from the proper name. Josephus (Antiquities 1.6.1), without citing evidence, identifies the people of Magog as the Scythians, although the Scythians are more properly denoted by the Hebrew name Ashkenaz (Akkadian Ishkuza = Scythians).
Meshech and Tubal are mentioned in Ezekiel (27:13; 32:26), in Genesis 10:2 (= 1 Chronicles 1:5), Isaiah 66:19 (Tubal), and Psalm 120:5 (Meshech). Both are Anatolian lands known to the Assyrians as Mushki and Tabal. Beth-Togarmah (mentioned in Ezekiel 27:14, Genesis 10:3, and 1 Chronicles 1:6) lies nearby in eastern Anatolia, where the ancient Hittite city of Tegarama stood. Gomer (Akkadian Gimirraia) refers to the Cimmerians north of the Black Sea. Also featured in Gog’s coalition are Persia, Libya, Sudan (Cush), and possibly Rosh, if this is not simply the word “head”. (The best recent scholarly defense of Rosh as a reference to modern-day Russia is by John Mark Ruthven, The Prophecy That Is Shaping History: New Research on Ezekiel’s Vision of the End.). Standing on the sidelines are the Arabian states Sheba and Dedan, and the merchants of Tarshish in the western Mediterranean.
The Gog prophecy does not demand an otherworldly interpretation. One may argue that it speaks of a real-life political scenario, and even the destruction of Gog in 38:17-23 has become believable to readers in a nuclear age. Contrast the Gog story with the scenario of the new Temple in Ezekiel 40-48, a temple that has never been built, where a river that detoxifies the Dead Sea flows from beneath the Temple, lined by quasi-magic trees. One can accept this as a vision of a heavenly place like John’s holy city in Revelation 21 (if one does not insist on literal fulfillment of animal sacrifice).
But is the Gog prophecy intended to be a description of a purely symbolic eschatological encounter between God and the forces of evil? Or does the passage permit (or even require) some measure of earthly fulfillment, to be consistent with the rest of what Ezekiel has written?
Ezekiel’s consistently recurring theme is that concrete events of judgment will happen on the earth, which will lead observers to conclude that God has truly spoken when those events take place. We need to ask: What might a fulfillment of the Gog prophecy look like, sufficient for an earthly audience to know that God has spoken?
Ezekiel’s prophecy of latter-day judgment on Gog is not set in never-never land. It specifies political states on a map. The peoples on that map may have changed in the past 2,500 years, but if the vision was a vision of a political scene far in the future, how else would it be described, other than by the naming of peoples who occupied the lands in question in Ezekiel’s time? Yesterday’s Cush may not equal today’s Sudan, yesterday’s Paras may not equal today’s Iran, Put may not equal today’s Libya, and yesterday’s Rosh, Gomer and Magog may not equal today’s Russians, but together, the Biblical characters cited in the Gog prophecy point to modern possible counterparts that one must stop and consider, even if the fulfillment of the prophecy is for a time other than our own.
How shall the modern reader understand Ezekiel 38-39? Should it be understood as a mistaken prediction that the Lydia-Media war of 585 BC would result in a great war to end all wars? Certainly that belief would not have lasted long; it also would have been irrelevant and/or meaningless to a nation exiled in Babylon at that time.
Should the Gog prophecy be taken as entirely mythopoetic? Should Gog be taken as a symbol for the biblical Antichrist, or Satan himself? What does a cosmic victory over evil mean, if it is not rooted in earthly reality? How will the residents on planet Earth know that Gog has been defeated? What will the conflict look like on the ground, in terms of geopolitics?
Dispensationalist Christians take the attack of Gog as a literal part of a final world war before the return of Christ. This approach can be hard to reconcile with Revelation 20, where Gog is mobilized after the millennial rule of the Messiah. The issue is less difficult to resolve for those who take the millennium symbolically. And if one takes the millennium symbolically, one may also take God’s conflict with Gog symbolically, in terms of God’s cosmic defeat of Satan.
However, one may also reserve room for the possibility that, just as Ezekiel’s prophecies of restoration have seen a degree of fulfillment in Israel’s history up to the present (exiles have returned, pre-exilic idolatry has been abolished), so Ezekiel’s predictions of final conflict with a coalition of earthly enemies may see a similar degree of fulfillment. One may obtain vague clues from the Biblical text, but no certain timetable or cast of characters.
Ezekiel’s vision of the attack of Gog is a bold piece of eschatology. In light of many of Ezekiel’s other prophecies, which offer tangible earthly signs by which observers would know that God had spoken, Ezekiel’s prophecy of Gog may likewise prove to have both a cosmic and an earthly fulfillment. If and when it does happen this way, then “the nations will know that I am YHWH.”
TOM HOBSON of Belleville, Ill., a PC(USA) pastor for 28 years, is adjunct professor at Morthland College, West Frankfort, Ill., and is currently seeking a pastoral call.
