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Gog and Magog (Hebrew: גּוֹג וּמָגוֹג Gog u-Magog; Arabic: يَأْجُوج وَمَأْجُوج Yaʾjūj wa-Maʾjūj; Persian: یگوگ و مگوگ yagug va Magug) are names that appear in the Old Testament, and in numerous subsequent references in other works, notably the Book of Revelation, as well as in the scripture of Islam, the Qur’an. They are sometimes individuals, sometimes peoples, and sometimes geographic regions. Their context can be either genealogical (asMagog in Genesis 10:2) or eschatological and apocalyptic, as in the Book of Ezekiel and Revelation. The passages from Ezekiel and Revelation in particular have attracted attention due to their prophetic descriptions of conflicts said to occur near the “end times“.
Etymology
The etymology of both the names Gog and Magog remains uncertain. The ma- at the beginning of Magog may indicate a land, or it may mean “from”, so that Magog means “of the land of Gog” or “from Gog”. Gog may originate as the Hebrew version of the name of Gyges of Lydia, who made his kingdom a great power in the early 7th century BC, but this explanation, although common, is not universally accepted. A different theory is that “Magog” might be a reference to Babylon, by turning BBL (“Babylon” in Hebrew script, which originally had no vowel-signs) into MGG (Magog), but this account, like the others, has problems.
Texts
Genesis and Chronicles
For more details on this topic, see Magog (Bible).
Chapter 10 of the Book of Genesis, commonly called the “Table of Nations“, names some 70 descendants of Noah from whom “the nations spread out over the earth after the Deluge.” Noah has three sons, Shem, Ham and Japheth; Magog is the second son of Japheth:
This is the account of Shem, Ham and Japheth, Noah’s sons, who themselves had sons after the flood. The sons of Japheth: Gomer, Magog, Madai, Javan, Tubal, Meshech and Tiras.
1 Chronicles begins with a list of genealogies repeating that in the Table of Nations but continuing well beyond. In chapter 5, among the many descendants of Reuben, first of the twelve sons of the patriarch Jacob, it mentions an individual named Gog.
Ezekiel
The two names first appear together in chapters 38 and 39 of the Book of Ezekiel, but here Magog is a place and not an individual:
Son of man, direct your face towards Gog, of the land of Magog, the prince, leader of Meshech and Tubal, and prophesy concerning him. Say: Thus said the Lord: Behold, I am against you, Gog, the prince, leader of Meshech and Tubal.
Ezekiel lived in the first half of the 6th century BC, and the earliest possible date for the prophecy is c. 585 BC. Scholars disagree, however, as to whether Ezekiel 38-39 was part of the original text (compare, for example, Joseph Blenkinsopp, who believes it to be a late addition, and Daniel Block, who argues for its original status). Its prophecy of a savage foe from the north is based on Jeremiah 1:3-16, where Jeremiah is talking about the Babylonians; Ezekiel turns this into an eschatological enemy who will come “in the latter years,” an apocalypse at the end of time.
Gog’s allies—Meshech and Tubal, Persia, Cush and Put, and “Gomer with all its troops, and Beth Togarmah from the far north”—are all, with the exception of Persia, taken from the Table of Nations. Meshech, Tubal, Gomer and Beth Togarmah can be identified with real 8th- and 7th-century peoples, kings or kingdoms of Anatolia, modern Turkey, while Gomer probably refers to the Central Asia (though ethnically Indo-European) horse nomads, the Cimmerians. “Why the prophet’s gaze should have focused on these particular nations is unclear,” says Daniel Block in a recent study of Ezekiel 25-48, but suggests that their remoteness and reputation for violence and mystery “made Gog and his confederates perfect symbols of the archetypal enemy, rising against God and his people.” Cush (Sudan or Ethiopia; but there is also a Cush in the Persian plateau—the land of the Kassites) and Put (from Punt: Somalia) are sons of Ham according to Genesis 10, while Persia is located to the east, and is not mentioned in Genesis 10 at all. Since Ezekiel insists on a northerly situation of Gog and his allies, many commentators believe that these three names were added later, although this too is disputed.
Gog is to be defeated and buried in the Valley of Hamon-Gog, Israel.
Intertestamental period
Around the middle of the 2nd century BC, the Sibylline Oracles mention the “land of Gog and Magog” as “situated in the midst of Aethiopian rivers”, but in a second mention links it with the “Marsians and Dacians“, in eastern Europe; in both cases they are about to receive “woe,” and according to Boe, “there can be little doubt about the direct use of Ezekiel’s oracles” in their composition.
The Book of Jubilees, known from about the same time, mentions Magog as a son of Japheth to whom land is allocated, while Gog is a region on Japheth’s borders. 1 Enoch tells how God stirs up the Medes and Parthians (instead of Gog and Magog) to attack Jerusalem, where they are destroyed; an indebtedness to Ezekiel 38-39 has also been asserted. In the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Messiah will rule “over all the peoples and Magog,” and Magog is allocated land next to Gomer, the first son of Japheth. The sole fragment where the two names are combined as “Gog and Magog” is too small to be meaningful. The 1st-century Liber Antiquitatum Biblicarum is notable for listing and naming seven of Magog’s sons, and mentions his “thousands” of descendants.
The Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, made during this period, occasionally introduces the name of Gog where the Hebrew original has something else. Thus at Numbers 24:7 it replaces Agag, a mysterious but clearly powerful figure, with Gog, and at Amos 7:1 the Greek has Gog as the leader of a threatening locust-like army The Greek translation of Ezekiel takes Gog and Magog to be synonyms for the same country, a step which paved the way for the Book of Revelation to turn “Gog from Magog” into “Gog and Magog.”
Book of Revelation
By the end of the 1st century, Jewish tradition had long since changed Ezekiel’s Gog from Magog into Gog and Magog, the ultimate enemies of God’s people, to be destroyed in the final battle. The author of the Book of Revelation tells how he sees in a vision Satan rallying Gog and Magog, “the nations in the four corners of the Earth,” to a final battle with Christ and his saints:
When the thousand years are over, Satan will be released from his prison and will go out to deceive the nations in the four corners of the Earth—Gog and Magog—and to gather them for battle. In number they are like the sand on the seashore.
Ezekiel’s Gog from Magog was a symbol of the evil darkness of the north and the powers hostile to God, but in Revelation, Gog and Magog have no geographic location, and instead represent the nations of the world, banded together for the final assault on Christ and those who follow him.
Qur’an
The story of Gog and Magog (also known as Yajuj and Majuj in the Qu’ran) is mentioned in the Qur’an in two occasions. First, in the Surat al-Kahf (“The Cave”, Surah 18:83-98) and second in the Surat al-Anbiya (“The Prophets”, Surah 21:95-96). In Surat Al-Kahf of the Qur’an, a pious warrior king called Dhul-Qarnayn whom Allah gave power journeys to the place between the East and the West. On his journey to the West, he comes across a people who live near a murky water, traditionally identified as modern day Black Sea. He then decrees to punish those who were found to have done acts of Dhulm (i.e. injustice and oppression) and reward those who have faith and do good deeds. And then he sets out to the direction of the East until he comes upon people who have no shield against the sun and left them undisturbed. On his third journey (northwards, identified as the Caucasus Mountains) he meets “a people who scarcely understood a word”. They seek his help by building a barrier that separate them from the people of Gog and Magog who “do great mischief on earth” and live across the mountain. He agrees to build it for them, and warns that when the time comes (Last Age commences), Allah “will make it to dust” and the people of Gog and Magog will breach through the barrier.
Surat Al-Kahf (“The Cave”, 18:83–98)
[83] They ask thee concerning Dhu’l-Qarnayn. Say, “I will rehearse to you something of his story.
[84] Verily We established his power on earth, and We gave him the ways and the means to all ends.
[85] One (such) way he followed,
[86] Until, when he reached the setting of the sun, he found it set in a spring of murky water: Near it he found a People: We said: “O Dhu’l-Qarnayn! (thou hast authority,) either to punish them, or to treat them with kindness.
[87] He said, “As for one who does acts of Dhulm (i.e. injustice and oppression), we will punish him. Then he will be returned to his Lord, and He will punish him with a terrible punishment.
[88] But as for one who believes and does righteousness, he will have a goodly reward, and we will speak to him from our command with ease.
[89] Then followed he (another) way,
[90] Until, when he came to the rising of the sun, he found it rising on a people for whom We had provided no covering protection against the sun.
[91] (He left them) as they were: We completely understood what was before him.
[92] Then followed he (another) way,
[93] Until, when he reached (a tract) between two mountains, he found, beneath them, a people who scarcely understood a word.
[94] They said: “O Dhu’l-Qarnayn! the Gog and Magog (People) do great mischief on earth: shall we then render thee tribute in order that thou mightest erect a barrier between us and them?
[95] He said: “(The power) in which my Lord has established me is better (than tribute): Help me therefore with strength (and labour): I will erect a strong barrier between you and them:
[96] “Bring me blocks of iron.” At length, when he had filled up the space between the two steep mountain-sides, He said, “Blow (with your bellows)” Then, when he had made it (red) as fire, he said: “Bring me, that I may pour over it, molten copper.
[97] So (Gog and Magog) were unable to pass over it, nor were they able to dig through it.
[98] He said: “This is a mercy from my Lord: But when the promise of my Lord comes to pass, He will make it into dust; and the promise of my Lord is true.”
Surat Al-Anbiya (“The Prophets”, 21:95–96) reads
“And there is prohibition upon [the people of] a city which We have destroyed that they shall not return, Until the Gog and Magog (people) are let through (their barrier), and they swiftly swarm from every hill”
Historical identifications
Classical and medieval worlds
Separate passages in the Jewish Antiquities and Jewish War of the 1st-century Jewish historian and scholar Josephus show that Jews of that time identified Gog and Magog with the Scythians: Alexander the Great, Josephus said, had locked these horse-riding barbarians of the far north behind the Caucasus mountains with iron gates. This gate is situated in Georgia, near the Russian border in the Caucasus mountains. Georgian kings were mentioned as guards of the Gog and Magog gate in various historical sources, both antique and Medieval. Jordanes, a Goth himself, identified Magog as one of the ancestors of the Goths in his book Getica. The Goths, according to Isidore of Seville, were thought to be descended from Gog and Magog, and of the same race as theGetae. Some early Christian writers (e.g.Eusebius) identified Gog and Magog with the Romans. After the Roman Empire became Christian, this was no longer possible, and attention switched to Rome’s northern barbarian enemies. Ambrose (d.397) identified them with the Goths, and Isidore of Seville confirmed that people in his day supposed that the Goths were descended from Magog “because of the similarity of the last syllable”. The idea that Gog and Magog were connected with the Goths was longstanding; in the mid-16th century, Archbishop of Uppsala Johannes Magnus traced the royal family of Sweden back to Magog son of Japheth, (Magnus identified two of Magog’s sons as Suenno, progenitor of the Swedes, and Gethar (also known as Gog or Gogus), ancestor of the Goths).
In the 6th century, the Byzantine historian Procopius of Caesarea (d. after 562) saw Attila and the Huns as the nation locked out by Alexander, and a little later, other Christian writers identified them with the Saracens. Still later, Gog and Magog became identified with the Khazars, whose empire dominated Central Asia in the 9th and 10th centuries. In his 9th-century work Expositio in Matthaeum Evangelistam, the Benedictine monk Christian of Stavelot referred to them as descendants of Gog and Magog, and says they are “Circumcised and observing all [the laws of] Judaism”; the 14th-century Sunni scholar Ibn Kathir also identified Gog and Magog with the Khazars, as did a Georgian tradition, which called them “wild men with hideous faces and the manners of wild beasts, eaters of blood”. According to the famous Khazar Correspondence (c. 960), King Joseph of Khazaria claimed to be a descendant of Magog’s nephew Togarmah.
The Mongols were the next barbarians. Early in the 13th century reports began to reach Europe of a mysterious and invincible horde from the east that destroyed Muslim empires and kingdoms, leading kings and popes to take them for Prester John, marching to save Christians from the Saracens; but when they entered Poland and Hungary and annihilated Christian armies, a terrified Europe concluded that they were “Magogoli”, the offspring of Gog and Magog, released from the prison Alexander had constructed for them and heralding Armageddon.
The Mongolian armies decided to turn back because of the death of Ögödei Khan back in the East and their defeat in the Battle of Ain Jalut in Palestine. Gog and Magog became the subject of literature. The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, a 14th-century best-seller, associated the Jews with Gog and Magog, saying the nation trapped behind the Gates of Alexander comprised the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. Marco Polo located Gog and Magog as regions of Tenduk, a province belonging to the legendary Prester John, and governed by one George, fourth in descent from the original John. According to this account Gog (locally Ung) is inhabited by a tribe called the Gog, whilst Magog (or Mongul) is inhabited byTatars. The 14th-century Muslim traveller Ibn Battuta reported that “the rampart of Yajuj and Majuj” was “sixty days’ travel” from the city of Zeitun; the translator notes that Ibn Battuta has confused the Great Wall of China with that built by Dhul-Qarnayn.
A German tradition claimed a group called the Red Jews would invade Europe at the end of the world; the “Red Jews” became associated with different peoples, but especially the Eastern European Jews and the Ottoman Turks.
Europe
The Ahmadiyya Muslim Community present the view that Gog and Magog represent one or more of the European nations. They associate European imperialism after the Age of Discovery with the reference to Gog and Magog’s rule at the “four corners of the world” in the Christian Book of Revelation. The Ahmadiyya founder Mirza Ghulam Ahmad (1835–1908) linked Gog and Magog to the European nations and Russia. His son and second successor, Mirza Basheer-ud-Din Mahmood Ahmad further expounds the connection between Europe and the accounts of Gog and Magog in the Bible, the Qur’an, and the hadith in his work Tafseer-e-Kabeer. According to this interpretation of Mahmood Ahmad in his commentary onSurah Al-Kahf (Urdu), Gog and Magog were the descendants of Noah who populated eastern and western Europe long ago, the Scythians. According to Ahmadiyya teachings, the period of the Cold War between the two superpowers, USA and the Soviet Union (identified as Gog and Magog) or the influence of Communism and capitalism, the conflict and rivalry between the two and the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union all occurred in accordance with the prophecies concerning Gog and Magog. Ahmadis also cite the folkloric British interpretation of Gog and Magog as giants (see below) as support for their view.
Ahmadis point out that the Arabic words for Gog and Magog i.e. Yājūj and Mājūj derive from the root word ajja (to burn, blaze, hasten) which suggests that Gog and Magog will excel all nations in harnessing fire to their service and shall fight their battles with fire. In his commentary of Surah-Al-Masadd, Mirza Mahmood Ahmad, the Second Ahmadiyya leader has interpreted the two hands of Abu-lahab (the father of flame) as Gog and Magog, the nations opposed to Islam that will ultimately be destroyed by the ‘fire’ of their own making.
Middle Ages
Jewish scholars of the Middle Ages, including Rashi, Radak and others, associated no specific nation or territory with Magog, beyond locating it to the north of Israel. According to the medieval rabbi Radak, Zechariah 14 refers to the war of Gog and Magog, when at the end of days Jerusalem will be the battle ground. In the early 19th century some Chasidic rabbis identified Napoleon‘s invasion of Russia as “The War of Gog and Magog” which would precede the coming of the Messiah, so that the Emperor filled the role of Gog. In the 20th century Hitler was seen as a likely candidate.
Russia
During the Cold War the Futurist idea (first advanced by Wilhelm Gesenius in the mid-1800s) that Russia itself had the role of Gog gained popularity (since Ezekiel’s words describing him as “prince of Meshek”—rosh meshek in Hebrew—sounded suspiciously like Russia and Moscow). This interpretation has been taken up by several Futurist Christian authors and preachers since then (such as Hal Lindsey‘s The Late Great Planet Earth; Grant R. Jeffrey‘s Armageddon: Appointment with Destiny; M. R. De Haan‘s The Signs of the Times; Tim LaHaye‘s Are We Living in the End Times?).
The popularity of this Futurist theory during the Cold War can be seen in that it was openly advocated in 1971 by the then Governor of California, Ronald Reagan. During a dinner address to state legislators Reagan said “Ezekiel tells us that Gog, the nation that will lead all of the other powers of darkness against Israel, will come out of the north. Biblical scholars have been saying for generations that Gog must be Russia. What other powerful nation is to the north of Israel? None. But it didn’t seem to make sense before the Russian revolution, when Russia was a Christian country. Now it does, now that Russia has become Communistic and atheistic, now that Russia has set itself against God. Now it fits the description of Gog perfectly.”
With the closing of the Cold War, some Futurist Christian thinkers who accepted this interpretation altered it after the fall of the Soviet Union (such as Pat Robertson who advocated it in his 1982 book The Secret Kingdom, but in 1992 suggested Gog was “Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Azerbaijan“). Other Futurist Christian thinkers do not consider the fall of communism to have any relevance in maintaining their interpretation that Russia is Gog (such as Chuck Missler in his book Magog Invasion).
In contrast to Futurist interpretations, Preterists associate Gog and Magog, especially that described in Ezekiel 38, with the Maccabean revolt against the Seleucid Empire in the second century B.C. According to the Preterist author David Chilton, the Futurist interpretation of Gog and Magog as Russia is in error. Chilton in the seminal Preterist text The Days of Vengeance noted that in Ezekiel 38:2 ‘The word chief is, in the Hebrew, rosh; some have therefore translated the text as ‘Gog, the prince of Rosh’. Rosh sounds something like Russia; therefore Gog is the prince of Russia. Unfortunately for this ingenious interpretation, rosh simply means head, and is used over 600 times in the Old Testament – never meaning ‘Russia’.
Some members of the Bahá’í Faith believe the Qur’anic prophecy of Gog and Magog was fulfilled during the Russo-Turkish Wars of the beginning of the 19th century. Russia conquered Crimea, the European part of the Ottoman Empire (including Adrianople), Iran’s Caucasian provinces and Central Asia.
The idea that Russia is Gog, is one that some Russians believe themselves according to historian Christopher Marsh. He writes “Russians and Ukrainians, [are] two peoples with a long history of looking to the Bible for clues to their past and future. At least as far back as the Primary Chronicle, the Rus’ looked to scripture for such clues and found them from Genesis to Revelations [sic]. They were the descendants of Noah’s third son, Japheth, giving themselves direct lineage to the diluvian period, and they were of the tribe of Magog (or Gog), in the land of Rosh. The implications of such identity as expressed in Revelations, where the Gog and Magog were both thrown out of heaven, apparently didn’t matter to those drawing these lines. Ancestors were found in the Bible, and that was enough.”
Guénon and Hinduism
In his 1945 book “The Reign of Quantity and The Sign of Times” metaphysician and author René Guénon has a full chapter on the subject of Gog and Magog (“The fissures of the great wall“). Gog and Magog are related to their Hindu counterpart called demon brothers Koka and Vikoka “whose names are obviously similar“, and refer symbolically, according to Guénon, not to groups of people on earth, but to entities belonging to the “subtle world” and having an existence presently hidden from the human realm and symbolically described as subterranean.
George W. Bush
In 2007, the former French president, Jacques Chirac said that in the prelude to the 2003 Invasion of Iraq, the US president George W. Bush told the French president that “Gog and Magog are at work in the Middle East.” The French presidency consulted Prof. Thomas Römer, of the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies of the University of Lausanne (Switzerland), to understand Bush’s reference.
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