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Introduction
The enigmatic figure Gog from the land of Magog makes his flamboyant appearance in Ezekiel 38-39, being accompanied by the other foreign nations such as Persia, Cush, Lud, Meshech and Tubal (38:1-5; 39:1). All of them rise up to invade the land of Israel (38:8-9, 16). They are all subsequently defeated (38:18-23). In the end, they are either left on the ground to be devoured by the birds of the sky and the beasts of the field (39:3-5, 17-20), or they are plundered and buried (39:8-10, 11-16). The identity of this Gog from the land of Magog has garnered much contemporary attention. The US politicians Reagan and Bush have associated Gog with their country’s bêtes noires, either the ‘communistic and atheistic’ Russia or the ‘evil’ Iraq. On the other hand, biblical scholars such as Galambush and Klein associated Gog of Magog with the foreign enemies of the ancient Israelites. Following a brief discussion of the political and scholarly identifications of Gog, this article argues that the semantic allusions embedded in Ezekiel 38-39, the literary position of the Gog oracles within the book of Ezekiel and the early receptions of the two chapters suggest that Gog and his entourage in Ezekiel 38-39 embody primarily Israel’s previous allies.
Modern political identifications of Gog
Over the past decades, the biblical figure Gog epitomises the foreign enemies of the USA. Ronald Reagan, who acted as California’s Governor between 1967 and 1975 during the Cold War, is reported to have unambiguously cited Ezekiel’s prophecy to justify his identification of Gog as Russia. As he reasons:
Ezekiel says that fire and brimstone will be rained upon the enemies of God’s people. That must mean that they’ll be destroyed by nuclear weapons. They exist now, and they never did in the past. 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...