Gog and Magog (; ), or Ya'juj and Ma'juj (), are a pair of names that appear in the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament of the Christian Bible, and the Quran, variously ascribed to individuals, tribes, or lands. In Ezekiel 38, Gog is an individual and Magog is his land. By the time of the New Testament's Revelation 20, Abrahamic tradition had come to view Ezekiel's "Gog from Magog" as "Gog and Magog".
The Gog prophecy is meant to be fulfilled at the approach of what is called the "end of days", but not necessarily the end of the world. Jewish eschatology viewed Gog and Magog as enemies to be defeated by the Messiah, which would usher in the Messianic Age. One view within Christianity is more starkly apocalyptic, making Gog and Magog allies of Satan against God at the end of the millennium, as described in the Book of Revelation.
A legend was attached to Gog and Magog by the time of the Roman period that the Gates of Alexander were erected by Alexander the Great to repel the tribe. Romanised Jewish historian Josephus knew them as the nation descended from Magog the Japhetite named in the Book of Genesis, hypothesizing them to be the Scythians. In the hands of Early Christian writers, they became apocalyptic hordes. Throughout the Middle Ages, they were variously identified as the Vikings, Huns, Khazars, Mongols or other nomads, or even the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel.
The legends of Gog and Magog and the gates were also interpolated into the Alexander Romances. According to one interpretation, "Goth and Magothy" are the kings of the Unclean Nations whom Alexander drove through a mountain pass and prevented from crossing his new wall. Gog and Magog are said to engage in human cannibalism in the romances and derived literature. They have also been depicted on medieval cosmological maps, or mappae mundi, sometimes alongside Alexander's wall.
The conflation of Gog and Magog with the legend of Alexander and the Iron Gates was disseminated throughout the Near East in the early centuries of the Christian and Islamic eras. They appear in the Quran in chapter al-Kahf as Yajuj and Majuj, primitive and immoral tribes that were separated and barriered off by Dhu'l-Qarnayn ("He of the Two Horns"), who is mentioned in the Quran as a great, righteous ruler and conqueror. Some Muslim historians and geographers contemporaneous with the Vikings regarded them as the emergence of Gog and Magog.
Names
The names are mentioned together in Ezekiel 38:2, with Gog being an individual and Magog as his land. The meaning of the name Gog remains uncertain, and in any case, the author of the Ezekiel prophecy seems to attach no particular importance to it. Efforts have been made to identify him with various individuals, notably Gyges, a king of Lydia in the early 7th century BC, but many scholars do not believe he is related to any historical individual.
In Genesis 10, Magog is described as a son of Japheth, and a grandson of Noah, although there is no mention there of a person named Gog. The name Magog itself is of obscure origin. It is often associated with Assyrian mat-Gugu ('Land of Gyges'; i.e., Lydia). Alternatively, Gog may be derived from Magog rather than the other way around, and "Magog" may be code for "Babylon". and cite Brownlee (1983) "Son of Man Set Your Face: Ezekiel the Refugee Prophet", HUCA 54.
The form "Gog and Magog" may have emerged as shorthand for "Gog and/of the land of Magog", based on their usage in the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible. An example of this combined form in Hebrew (Gog u-Magog) has been found, but its context is unclear, being preserved only in a fragment of the Dead Sea Scrolls. In the book of Revelation, Gog and Magog together are the hostile nations of the world. Gog the Reubenite occurs in 1 Chronicles , but he has no connection with the Gog of Ezekiel or Magog of Genesis.
The biblical "Gog and Magog" may have given rise to the name Gogmagog, a legendary British giant. A later corrupted folk rendition in print altered the tradition around Gogmagog and Corineus with two giants Gog and Magog, with whom the Guildhall statues came to be identified.
Jewish texts Ezekiel
The Book of Ezekiel records a series of visions received by the prophet Ezekiel, a priest of Solomon's Temple, who was among the captives during the Babylonian exile. The exile, he tells his fellow captives, is God's punishment on Israel for turning away, but God will restore his people to Jerusalem when they return to him. After this message of reassurance, chapters 38–39, the Gog oracle, tell how Gog of Magog and his hordes will threaten the restored Israel but will be destroyed, after which God will establish a new Temple and dwell with his people for a period of lasting peace (chapters 40–48).
Internal evidence indicates that the Gog oracle was composed substantially later than the chapters around it. Of Gog's allies, Meshech and Tubal were 7th-century BC kingdoms in central Anatolia north of Israel, Persia towards the east, Cush (Ethiopia) and Put (Libya) to the south; Gomer is the Cimmerians, a nomadic people north of the Black Sea, and Beth Togarmah was on the border of Tubal. The confederation thus represents a multinational alliance surrounding Israel. "Why the prophet's gaze should have focused on these particular nations is unclear", comments Biblical scholar Daniel I. Block, but their remoteness and reputation for violence and mystery possibly "made Gog and his confederates perfect symbols of the archetypal enemy, rising against God and his people." One explanation is that the Gog alliance, a blend of the "Table of Nations" in Genesis 10 and Tyre's trading partners in Ezekiel 27, with Persia added, was cast in the role of end-time enemies of Israel by means of Isaiah 66:19, which is another text of eschatological foretelling.
Although the prophecy refers to Gog as an enemy in some future, it is not clear if the confrontation is meant to occur in a final "end of days" since the Hebrew term aḥarit ha-yamim () may merely mean "latter days", and is open to interpretation. Twentieth-century scholars have used the term to denote the eschaton in a malleable sense, not necessarily meaning final days, or tied to the Apocalypse. Still, the Utopia of chapters 40–48 can be spoken of in the parlance of true eschatological character, given that it is a product of "cosmic conflict" described in the immediately preceding Gog chapters.
The Septuagint reads "Gog" instead of "Agag" in Numbers 24:7.
Over the next few centuries Jewish tradition changed Ezekiel's Gog from Magog into Gog and Magog. The process, and the shifting geography of Gog and Magog, can be traced through the literature of the period. The 3rd book of the Sibylline Oracles, for example, which originated in Egyptian Judaism in the middle of the 2nd century BC, changes Ezekiel's "Gog from Magog" to "Gog and Magog", links their fate with up to eleven other nations, and places them "in the midst of Aethiopian rivers"; this seems a strange location, but ancient geography did sometimes place Ethiopia next to Persia or even India. The passage has a highly uncertain text, with manuscripts varying in their groupings of the letters of the Greek text into words, leading to different readings; one group of manuscripts ("group Y") links them with the "Marsians and Dacians", in eastern Europe, amongst others.
The Book of Jubilees, from about the same time, makes three references to either Gog or Magog: in the first, Magog is a descendant of Noah, as in Genesis 10; in the second, Gog is a region next to Japheth's borders; and in the third, a portion of Japheth's land is assigned to Magog. The 1st-century , which retells Biblical history from Adam to Saul, is notable for listing and naming seven of Magog's sons, and mentions his "thousands" of descendants. The Samaritan Torah and the Septuagint (a Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible made during the last few centuries of the pre-Christian era) occasionally introduce the name of Gog where the Hebrew original has something else, or use Magog where the Hebrew has Gog, indicating that the names were interchangeable.
Midrashic writings The anti-Roman Bar Kokhba revolt in the 2nd century AD looked to a human leader as the promised messiah, but after its failure Jews began to conceive of the messianic age in supernatural terms: first would come a forerunner, the Messiah ben Joseph, who would defeat Israel's enemies, identified as Gog and Magog, to prepare the way for the Messiah ben David; then the dead would rise, divine judgement would be handed out, and the righteous would be rewarded.
The aggadah, homiletic and non-legalistic exegetical texts in the classical rabbinic literature of Judaism, treat Gog and Magog as two names for the same nation who will come against Israel in the final war. The rabbis associated no specific nation or territory with them beyond a location to the north of Israel,Mikraot Gedolot HaMeor p. 400 but the great Jewish scholar Rashi identified the Christians as their allies and said God would thwart their plan to kill all Israel.
Commentary on Torah portion "Nasso" The "Fruit of the Righteous" or "Pri Tzaddik" on the weekly portion Nasso, connects Gog u-Magog with Amalek. In this work from Rabbi Zadok HaKohen of Lublin it can be read in chapter 15:2:
Similarly, in the Tanakh, book of Judges 5:14 (JPS 1985) it can be read:
Christian texts
Revelation Chapters 19:11–21:8 of the Book of Revelation, dating from the end of the 1st century AD, tell how Satan is to be imprisoned for a thousand years, and how, on his release, he will rally "the nations in the four corners of the Earth, Gog and Magog", to a final battle with Christ and his saints:
Alexander Romance The Alexander Romance of Pseudo-Callisthenes describes gates constructed by Alexander the Great between two mountains called the "Breasts of the North" (). The mountains are initially 18 feet apart and the pass is rather wide, but Alexander's prayers to God causes the mountains to draw nearer, thus narrowing the pass. There he builds the Caspian Gates out of bronze, coating them with fast-sticking oil. The gates enclosed twenty-two nations and their monarchs, including Gog and Magog (therein called "Goth and Magoth"). The geographic location of these mountains is rather vague, described as a 50-day march away northwards after Alexander put to flight his Belsyrian enemies (the Bebrykes, of Bithynia in modern-day North Turkey).
Christian texts following in the tradition of the Alexander Romance, such as the Syriac Alexander Legend (late 7th century) and the Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius (7th century) would continue to identify Gog and Magog as among those barbarian groups encapsulated behind Alexander's walls, but they would also combine this with the apocalyptic motif of Revelation and assert that the end of the world would also involve the barbarian groups penetrating through the wall and bringing about the apocalypse.
Islamic texts
Two chapters of the Qur'an, al-Kahf (Chapter 18) and al-Anbiya (Chapter 21), discuss Gog and Magog. In the Qur'an, Ya'juj and Ma'juj (Gog and Magog) are suppressed by Dhu'l-Qarnayn (). Dhu'l-Qarnayn, having journeyed to the ends of the world, meets "a people who scarcely understood a word" who seek his help in building a barrier that will separate them from the people of Ya'juj and Ma'juj who "do great mischief on earth." He agrees to build it for them, but warns that when the time comes (Last Age), God will remove the barrier.