Gog

The watchmen on the walls would have seen it first as a stain on the northern horizon, a darkening that moved against the wind. Then the sound reached them: hooves, thousands of them, a low and rolling thunder rising out of the cold countries where the old maps simply stopped. At the head of that thunder rode Gog.

Gog is the invader the prophet Ezekiel saw coming, and the first odd thing about him is how little of him is solid. The vision names him “Gog, of the land of Magog, the chief prince of Meshech and Tubal,” and nearly every word of that title has been turned over and argued about for twenty-five centuries. Magog appears in the book of Genesis among the sons of Japheth, grandsons of Noah, which fixed it somewhere in the vague and frozen north and later bound it, loosely, to the Scythian horse peoples of the steppe. Meshech and Tubal were genuine regions of Anatolia. Gog himself resists that kind of pinning down. The widest agreement is that Gog is less a personal name than an office, the title borne by whoever rules the last kingdom past the edge of the known world.

What Ezekiel lays out is an invasion arranged for a single purpose. In the latter days, when Israel has come back from exile and lives in open country, unwalled and unsuspecting, God sets hooks in Gog’s jaws and turns him south. The host that follows him is staggering. Persia, Cush, and Put march under his command, Gomer and the house of Togarmah ride down from the uttermost north, a coalition so broad it comes on like a cloud rolling over the hills. They come for spoil: silver, cattle, the stored wealth of a people who believe themselves safe at last. They almost reach it.

There is a moment before any of this, in the staging grounds beyond the mountains, that the vision lingers on. The smell of horse and oiled leather. Shields stacked in the cold. A prince walking the lines of his allies, counting the nations that have answered his call, and finding the count good. This is Gog doing the one thing he exists to do, gathering a force no walled city on earth could hope to hold.

The march ends on the mountains of Israel, and it ends badly. Ezekiel’s account of the defeat is almost geological in its violence. The ground heaves in an earthquake that throws down cliffs and walls. In the confusion every soldier’s sword turns against the man beside him. Rain and hailstones, fire and burning sulphur fall out of the sky onto the horde. There is no duel, no clash of champions, no decisive charge. The greatest army the north can assemble is simply unmade where it stands.

What comes after is quieter and stranger. For seven months the people of Israel walk the valley east of the sea with spades, burying the dead until the land is ritually clean again, and they give the place a name that keeps the memory: the Valley of Hamon-Gog, the valley of Gog’s multitude. The abandoned weapons last even longer. Shields and bucklers, bows and arrows, the spears and the wooden hand-clubs feed the cooking fires of the towns for seven years, so that no one needs to gather kindling from the fields.

Gog arrives in the story with no childhood and no making. There is no birth, no first deed, no slow climb to power. He is already a king and already armed when the vision finds him, which suits what he actually is. Gog is a function wearing a crown, the shape the worst possible enemy takes: the last and largest threat the outer dark can send against the people of God.

The book of Revelation took the names and bent them into a new form. Long after Ezekiel, in John’s vision of the end, a thousand years of peace come to a close, Satan is released from his prison, and he goes out to deceive “the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth, Gog and Magog.” They cross the whole breadth of the world and ring the camp of the saints and the beloved city, and fire comes down from heaven and consumes them. Here Gog is no longer a prince at all. He has become plural, a name stretched over every nation that will ever rise in rebellion, and the single warlord of Ezekiel dissolves into the crowd he once led.

The name went on traveling, and in medieval Britain it slipped its origins entirely. Geoffrey of Monmouth’s history of the kings of Britain told of Gogmagog, a giant of Cornwall hurled off a sea-cliff in a wrestling match by Corineus, a companion of the Trojan founder of Britain. Over the centuries the one giant somehow became two, Gog and Magog, carved from wood and carried through the streets of London, installed as guardian statues in the Guildhall, paraded every year in the Lord Mayor’s Show. The enemy of the apocalypse had been promoted to civic mascot.

A parallel runs through Islamic tradition, where Yajuj and Majuj are sealed away behind a great barrier of iron and molten copper raised by the figure called Dhul-Qarnayn. Each day they scratch and dig at the wall, and each night what they have worn away is restored, until the appointed time when the barrier finally fails and they pour out across the world. It is the same fear in different dress: a host held back at the rim of things, waiting.

Through all of it, no source ever describes Gog’s face or body. The prophet was interested in the army, not the man. What Ezekiel does set down, in careful detail, is the equipment: horses and horsemen, every soldier clothed in full armor, the great company with shields and bucklers, the bows, the arrows, the hand-staves and the spears. The man at the center of that iron is left blank, and the blank is the point. Anyone could be Gog.

Whatever power Gog holds is the power of sheer mass, the gravity that draws distant and unrelated nations into one enormous host and points them at a single valley. He is a gatherer of armies on a scale nothing mortal can answer. Against the only force that matters, he has nothing at all. Gog does not choose his war. He moves when the hooks move him, marches because he is drawn south, and arrives on the mountains of Israel only to be buried under them. His defeat is written before his muster ever begins. The vast coalition, the cloud of horsemen, the seven years of firewood all exist for one reason: so that the nations watching will know who actually decides the end.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Gog in the Bible?

Gog is a prophesied invader described in the Book of Ezekiel, chapters 38 and 39, named as “Gog, of the land of Magog, the chief prince of Meshech and Tubal.” Most readers understand Gog as a title for the ruler of a distant northern kingdom rather than a personal name. He leads a vast coalition of nations against Israel in the latter days and is destroyed by God.

What is the war of Gog and Magog?

The war of Gog and Magog is the end-times invasion foretold in Ezekiel, in which Gog leads an enormous army down from the far north to plunder an Israel living at peace. The attack fails catastrophically: an earthquake, plague, and fire from the sky destroy the horde without a conventional battle. The defeat is followed by seven months of burying the dead and seven years of burning the abandoned weapons.

Are Gog and Magog a person or two nations?

In Ezekiel, Gog is an individual leader and Magog is the land he comes from. By the time of the Book of Revelation, the phrase had shifted, and “Gog and Magog” became the name for the rebellious nations of the whole earth that Satan gathers for a final assault. So the answer depends on the text: a prince and his country in Ezekiel, a pair of symbolic nations in Revelation.

How is Gog defeated?

Gog is defeated entirely by divine power, not by any human army. As his coalition reaches the mountains of Israel, God strikes the host with an earthquake, turns the soldiers’ swords against one another, and rains down fire, sulphur, and hailstones. In Revelation’s version, fire simply falls from heaven and consumes the gathered nations.

Why are there giants named Gog and Magog in London?

The London giants come from a separate medieval tradition that borrowed the biblical names. Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote of Gogmagog, a Cornish giant defeated by the warrior Corineus, and over time that single giant split into the pair Gog and Magog. They became guardian figures of the City of London, displayed in the Guildhall and carried in the annual Lord Mayor’s Show.

Related Entries

Antichrist, Satan, Lucifer, Leviathan, Behemoth, Nephilim, Lilith, Adam, Eve, Noah, Jesus, Angels, Dajjal, Dhul-Qarnayn