Who Are Gog and Magog?

Two different passages of the Bible use these names, and they do not mean the same thing by them. Noticing that clears up most of the confusion in one step.

In Ezekiel 38 and 39, Gog is a person. He is a ruler of the land of Magog, so Magog is a place and Gog is the man who comes out of it. In Revelation 20:8, written roughly six centuries later, Gog and Magog are not a man and his country at all. They are nations, plural, gathered from every direction. John has taken two names out of Ezekiel and used them as a label.

So when someone asks who Gog and Magog are, the useful first question back is: in which passage?

The two texts, side by side

Son of man, set thy face against Gog, the land of Magog, the chief prince of Meshech and Tubal, and prophesy against him Ezekiel 38:2

And shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to battle: the number of whom is as the sand of the sea. Revelation 20:8

The shift did not start with John. Jewish writing in the centuries before him had already fused the two names into one idiom. The third book of the Sibylline Oracles writes "Gog and Magog" as a pair rather than Ezekiel's "Gog of the land of Magog", and rabbinic literature speaks of the war of Gog and Magog as a standing phrase for the last assault before the age of the Messiah, as at Sanhedrin 97b. By the time Revelation was written, the pair had become shorthand.

John also tells you what he means by it. The clause "which are in the four quarters of the earth" comes before the names, not after, which reads as a definition rather than a hint.

Magog in the table of nations

The first appearance of the name is a genealogy, not a prophecy.

The sons of Japheth; Gomer, and Magog, and Madai, and Javan, and Tubal, and Meshech, and Tiras. Genesis 10:2

Four of those seven names come back in Ezekiel 38: Gomer, Magog, Tubal and Meshech. Ezekiel is drawing his cast list from the table of nations, which is worth knowing before any modern map is opened. He is naming peoples from the known edges of the world, in the vocabulary his readers already had.

Josephus, writing in the first century, said the descendants of Magog were the people the Greeks called Scythians, the horse nomads of the steppe north of the Black and Caspian Seas. That is the oldest surviving identification, and it is a report from a later Jewish historian rather than a statement in the text itself.

Who comes with Gog

Ezekiel 38:5 and 6 list the coalition: Persia, Ethiopia and Libya, then Gomer and the house of Togarmah of the north quarters. In Hebrew, Ethiopia is Cush, the region up the Nile beyond Egypt, and Libya is Put, on the North African coast. Persia is roughly modern Iran.

The northern names are better attested than most readers expect. Meshech and Tubal appear in Assyrian records as the Mushku and Tabal, and in Herodotus as the Moschoi and Tibarenoi, peoples of eastern Anatolia, which is modern Turkey. Togarmah corresponds to Assyrian Til-garimmu, in the same region. Gomer is usually identified with the Cimmerians, who moved through that area in the seventh century BC.

Ezekiel 38:15 says Gog comes "from thy place out of the north parts". The picture is a ring of distant peoples converging on a land described as unwalled and at rest.

The chief prince question

The Hebrew behind "chief prince" is nesi rosh Meshech we-Tubal. Everything in the popular debate turns on that middle word.

Rosh is an ordinary Hebrew noun meaning head, top or chief, and it occurs hundreds of times in the Old Testament in that sense. The question is whether Ezekiel is using it that way here, or using it as the name of a place.

That table alone is worth pausing on, because the King James Version, which many readers of this subject use, takes the title reading. So does the Latin Vulgate, which is where the English tradition of "chief prince" begins.

The argument against treating Rosh as a place is that no such land is named anywhere else in the Hebrew Bible. The strongest argument for it came from James D. Price, who pointed to an Assyrian land called Rashu or Rasu in the records of Sargon, which would make Rosh a real ancient territory. It is worth reading his case, and worth noting where it puts the place: Sargon's inscription locates Rasu on the border of Elam beside the Tigris, which is south-east of Babylon. Daniel Block, whose commentary on Ezekiel is the standard technical work, splits the difference and renders the phrase "the prince, chief of Meshech and Tubal".

The Russia identification

Many sincere readers hold that Ezekiel is describing Russia. The reading deserves to be stated properly rather than caricatured.

It rests on three links. Rosh is taken as a proper name and connected to the Rus. Meshech is connected to Moscow and Tubal to Tobolsk. And "the north parts" is read as the territory directly north of Israel on a map, which runs up through the Caucasus into Russia. Wilhelm Gesenius, the great Hebrew lexicographer who died in 1842, made the Rosh and Rus connection in his lexicon, and from there it passed into the notes of the Scofield Reference Bible and then into a century of popular prophecy writing.

The difficulties are also worth stating plainly. Meshech and Tubal are documented in Assyrian and Greek sources as peoples of Anatolia, so the Moscow and Tobolsk pairing is a resemblance in sound rather than a match in the records. The name Rus enters the historical record in the ninth century AD, more than a thousand years after Ezekiel. And most modern lexicons and most modern translations read rosh as a title.

Defenders answer that Ezekiel names peoples rather than modern states, that peoples migrate, and that the case does not stand or fall on one word. That exchange has not been closed. Where you land on it is a judgement about how prophetic texts name nations, and it is not a measure of anyone's seriousness about Scripture.

The ancient candidates

If Gog is a historical figure rather than a symbol, the most frequently proposed match is Gyges of Lydia, in western Asia Minor, who appears in the annals of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal as Gugu. The name fits well. The chronology does not: Gyges died in the 650s BC, decades before Ezekiel began to prophesy in 593 BC. Those who keep the identification treat the name as standing for the dynasty or for a type of ruler rather than for the man.

Older commentators, including Matthew Poole, John Trapp and Adam Clarke, proposed Antiochus IV Epiphanes. Others have suggested Nebuchadnezzar. A large body of modern scholarship concludes that Gog is not any single historical king but a figure constructed for the oracle, a personification of the massed hostility of the nations.

The honest summary is that no identification commands agreement, and Ezekiel never supplies one.

How the views connect the two battles

Revelation touches Ezekiel 38 and 39 twice, not once. The birds summoned to the supper in Revelation 19:17 and 18 come almost line by line from Ezekiel 39:17 to 20, and then the names arrive at 20:8. That double contact is one reason the relationship between Revelation 19 and 20 is argued about so hard.

Three answers are on offer across those rows: one event described twice, two events a thousand years apart, or one symbol used twice for the same enduring reality.

Which answer you reach is decided almost entirely by something upstream. It depends on whether the thousand years of Revelation 20 is a future period on a calendar or a description of the present age, and on whether chapter 20 follows chapter 19 in time or circles back over the same ground.

Separate the two passages and the mystery about the names largely dissolves. What is left is the harder question underneath, which is what Revelation 20 is describing from verse 7 to verse 10, and where in history it belongs.