Gog and Magog
Introduction
Rather than focus on one specific apocalyptic text, I have decided to choose the recurring apocalyptic figure(s) of Gog and Magog, and to approach it from more of a survey fashion than on any one particular text. I decided this because Gog and Magog are ubiquitous with typical apocalyptic characteristics. Yet in any one specific text there is little information, and because what makes Gog and Magog unique is the constant adoption into new religions and cultures, what elements stay in popular consciousness and which are adapted to fit a particular threat or fear of the time.
For the sake of simplicity, I will henceforth refer to Gog and Magog in plural form, as “them”. Sometimes one name is used interchangeably with the other, sometimes both as one, sometimes “Gog from Magog” etc. I will look at Ezekiel 38-39. I will briefly touch on the various Legends of Alexander that expand the myth of Gog and Magog, and eventually was the inspiration for later references in the Qu’ran. The excerpts from non-canonical scripture (ie. excluding the Old Testament and the Qu’ran) I will use from the book “Gog and Magog in Early Eastern Christian and Islamic Sources” by Emeri van Donzel and Andrea Schmidt.
Gog and Magog in Genesis: Establishing the Human Enemy
Ezekiel is not the first mention of Gog and Magog – that comes briefly in Genesis, when it describes the people of Magog as descendants of Noah's son Japeth (Genesis 10:2). This establishes Gog and Magog early on as fundamentally human figures. While the forces that will cause the end of the world are fundamentally up to God's will, we are told, it is bloodthirsty humans that will carry the sword. It will not be allegorical horsemen in the apocalypse but the literal – such as the Hun or Mongol (or American).The corporeality of this enemy likely has a lot to do with its timelessness. It seems that many cultures change their definition of Gog and Magog to fit their world – they can be Assyrian or Goth; they are the uncivilized “other” that threatens to destroy the society of believers.
This is interesting first because the fact that Gog and Magog are allegedly real people (or places) makes much easier to prophesize about them than it would be for an invisible force. It also lends the apocalyptic fears an element of truth – the Mongols could very plausibly come down from the hills the next day and kill everyone in the society, causing the end of their world. These two factors, the nebulous but very real identity of the harbingers of the end times and the very dangerous world most of humanity has historically lived in, are likely factors that cause them to recur. With all this being said however, in Genesis Magog is just a geographic descriptor with no apocalyptic connotations until Ezekiel.
Gog and Magog in Ezekiel: Instruments of God's Will
In Ezekiel 38, the apocalyptic nature of Gog and Magog becomes clearly established, through a dialogue between God and Gog and Magog. God tells them “You will say, “I will invade a land of unwalled villages; I will attack a peaceful and unsuspecting people—all of them living without walls and without gates and bars” (Ezekiel 38:7). I find this passage interesting mainly for two reasons. First, that while Gog and Magog may be human enemies, they operate under God's agency, that he tells them what they will want to do. The other is the emphasis on people unsuspecting and undefended. The implication here is that people should always live on guard, always in fear. It is stated several times that Gog and Magog will come when the people are “living in safety/dwelling securely” (Ezekiel 38:8).
This effectively pre-empts any argument against the feasibility/realism of Gog and Magog coming to destroy them. For instance, some people in modern times have referred to Russia as Magog. I could say that as a Canadian in a post-Cold War world, the risk of Russia invading Canada is very slim, because we live in such safety. This would be refuted by the fact that not only is that safety not real, but it in fact makes us even more susceptible to attack. This effectively makes any time a possible apocalyptic one. If we are at war, Gog and Magog are our enemies. If we have no enemies, that just means we do not recognize the ones that are plotting to destroy us. A cynic might postulate that this element of fear helps religious authorities hold power.
Ezekiel 39 describes some of the details of this coming conflict. God's involvement is emphasized. When the Israelites stand up against the oncoming enemy, God plans to sabotage their defense, when he states he “will strike your bow from your left hand and make your arrows drop from your right hand” (Ezekiel 39:3). That being said, after God renders the Israelites’ weapons useless, God “will summon a sword against Gog on all my mountains, declares the Sovereign LORD. Every man’s
sword will be against his brother” (Ezekiel 38: 21).
To me, this is a tough concept to wrap my head around: that God will send an enemy to destroy you, prevent you from defending yourself, and then destroy your enemy. It is all wrapped up in vengeance and cleansing. God states ““I will make known my holy name among my people Israel. I will no longer let my holy name be profaned, and the nations will know that I the LORD am the Holy One in Israel” (Ezekiel 39:7), and at many other points these chapters God emphasizes the actions of Gog and Magog are part of God's judgment. What separates this judgment from others such as Sodom and Gomorrah is that the only commandment broken is the first. It is not when the Israelites become sinful or hedonistic that the armies will attack them, but merely when their belief wavers, or they do not give God the respect he deserves. Just like the “they will come when your guard is down” element, having Gog and Magog attack when people's dedication to God falters is an effective way to control a population through fear.
Post-Ezekiel: Early Christian Reactions
In van Donzel and Schmit's book they take an excerpt from Isidore of Seville from 636, in which he conjectures that Goths were contemporary Gog (hence the similar names). They write
Isidore's description of the Gothic incursions bring to mind the vivid pictures with which both Greek and Syriac authors paint the invasions into the Roman Empire of the “barbarians” symbolized by God and Magog: cannibalism, mothers eating their own children, and animals accustomed to devour corpses. (van Donzel, Schmidt 14)
Strangely, the authors neglect to mention that this final element, animals eating corpses, appears in Ezekiel 38:17-18. Not only does it appear in that book, but it seems to be a positive thing, with the animals becoming corpulent from the corpses. It also helps cleanse the land of deceased Gog. While the Greek and Syriac writers seem to disagree whether animals eating humans is a good or bad thing, they seem to agree on how strange and powerful of an image it is. This leads me into the aspect of cannibalism. Bear with me for a moment: The Wari people of Brazil would practice cannibalism, but what makes them distinct from other people that have done the same is that they not only eat the flesh of their enemies (like the Aztecs), they also eat their dead loved ones. What these acts have in common is the element of intimacy: eating someone seems make the eater closer to the eaten – they consume their enemies out of intense hatred, and to get an “ultimate victory” and they eat their family out of intense love, and to make their loved ones a part of themselves. Just like in the Bible, a person being eaten, whether its good or bad, is a powerful thing, and we should keep this in mind when the people of Israel are devoured by Gog (a prophecy that often arises) or the people of God are eaten by birds (an act of supreme vengeance in Ezekiel 38).
Alexander and the Wall
It is through the various interpretations of the story of Alexander the Great that the Gog and Magog mythology gets expanded. The most major new element of the story is that of Alexander's wall. The psychological implications of this are interesting: that the enemy already exists, already wants to destroy us but are physically blocked and thwarted by man and God's constant vigilance. Alexander building the wall appears in the Syriac Alexander Legend, which was an appendix attached to the Syriac Alexander Romance, written around 630 CE. As we saw before with the Gogs being a tool for God's agency, Alexander is a tool as well, sent to protect the Israelites from the Huns/Gogs.
In the Legend, Gog and Magog are described as horse-mounted hordes with blue eyes and red hair. They are dressed in skins, eat raw carrion and drink the blood of men and animals. They are swifter than the wind, running between heaven and earth, their chariots and swords and spears flash like fearful lightning... (Van Donzel, Schmidt 18).
Beyond recalling my earlier mention of Cannibalism, I find this fascinating because Gog and Magog are mythical, allegorical figures based in the imaginations on believers on very real enemies. The people's conception of Gog and Magog seems like a nightmare of the Huns – they were very certainly very barbaric, very fast and very powerful. It doesn't seem hard to take a memory of a thousand Huns on horseback and turn it into one of one hundred thousand – for it surely felt that way at the time. This psychological projection becomes particularly interesting when the women of Gog and Magog “have only one breast and they hang knives upon their thighs, arms, necks, so that, wherever a woman stretches out her hand she can lay hold of a knife with which she wounds a man” (19). I cannot help but think of the vaguely sexual connotations of this. I imagine the shock of villagers seeing marauding Hun women, and how they became more warped and feared in their imaginations than Hun men.
Likewise, Alexander as a defender equally conflates a real-world source with mythical attributes. The Huns were numerous, so the sons of Gog each had 1000 children. Alexander defended lands against the barbarian horde, so mythical Alexander built a preposterously large physical wall between a mountain pass. One of the central qualities of Gog and Magog is how often and easily and often their name and general likeness are appropriated by various cultures. I think a main motivator with combining Biblical villains with contemporary ones is one of theodicy: it gives the victims some relief knowing that their suffering is not random or pointless, but is in fact a small part of God's great plan, and that eventually, someday, justice will be done. It is much more comforting than the idea that Goths can rape and pillage for centuries, just because they are more powerful. If one's enemy is Gog and Magog, then present pain will be redeemed, and one becomes firmly on the side of the righteous.
Later Christian Reactions: Talking Babies, Eating Kittens
This combining of human evil and evil incarnate is an interesting one. In van Donzel and Schmidt's book, an excerpt is taken from the Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius, which I wanted to share for one (in my mind, hilarious) reason. On the inhuman habits of Gog and Magog:
They will be eaten in the sight of their parents while they are watching. For these peoples that will come out from the north eat human flesh, drink the blood of wild beasts, and eat the creeping things of the earth – mice, snakes and scorpions, and all the unclean reptiles that creep on the ground, and even the bodies of abominable animals and the aborted of the cattle. They will slaughter the children and give (them) to their mothers and force them to eat the bodies of their sons. They even eat dead dogs and kittens and all kinds of imagination. They will destroy the earth, and nobody will be able to stand before them (van Donze,, Schmidt 29, quoting Pseudo-Methodius 2, emphases mine)
What I find so neat about this passage is that from a narrative perspective, they hardly save the best for last. In both cases, the “they even...!” actions are less objectionable than the previous ones. “They eat human flesh – AND EVEN PORK” or “they make mothers eat their children AND EVEN EAT KITTENS”. The book's source for Pseudo-Methodius is German, and I could not find my own translation, so I'm not sure if “kittens” and not “cats” is the true translation. If it is, there is something almost absurd in the choice of words, and something strange where the original author's priorities lie (I suppose that cannibalism at least is still kosher?). Likewise, the Coptic Christians write that Gog and Magog “are given the classical eschatological function of announcing the Antichrist” (37). The Apocalypse of Pseudo-Athanasius states:
“[T]hree signs will announce the arrival of the ferocious king: the water of springs and rivers will be changed into blood and this will remain so for an hour; water becomes bitter; babies talk at the age of three months; at harvest-time blood will come forth from the earth. The wise people then will flee to the mountains because after that the nation which is confined behind the land of the Arabs will come forth; they are the two distasteful Gog and Magog. The earth will tremble before them, and people will flee to the mountains, to caves and graveyards, and they will die of hunger and thirst” (37-38, quoting J. Ziadeh's translation).
We see here that Gog and Magog have acquired a new eschatological significance: less like the cause of the Israelite destruction, and more like bystanders of it. Most of the destruction is typical God fare, like what he does for Moses against the Egyptians. It appeals less to the fear of invaders, and more to the fear of starvation and failing crops. Perhaps it is evolved from the nightmares of a nomadic people to those of an agricultural people. It all has to do with making vitality dead, through the most basic forms of water and food.
What is a little odd about the passage is the inclusion of babies talking at a few months old. Unlike people starving or being killed by armies, talking babies is not an inherently bad thing in the same way. They do however help me understand eschatological concepts when taken in tandem with the previous apocalyptic except: talking babies is evil simply because it turns the way of the world upside down. It does not matter whether or not the children talk with the voices of Satan. It is not physically destructive, but the upturning of God's law is in itself an evil. Just like people eating pork is in the same paragraph as people eating people, talking babies and famine go together because they are both examples of something seriously strange happening in the natural world. And strangeness in this context means wrong, in and of itself. While nobody is directly hurt by talking babies, the very ungodliness of it is harmful to the world in the same way that Gog and Magog are.
Gog and Magog in Islam
In addition to being able to call from the literature of Ezekiel, Muslims can find significant mentions in the Qu’ran and the Surah. Surah 18 mentions specifically the building of a large physical wall between Muslims and Gog and Magog, until one day it will fall, and Gog and Magog “will present Hell, on that day, to the disbelievers” (Surah 18:100). This differs from Ezekiel in its shift in focus from everyone getting killed to merely the unbelievers, therefore emphasizing the safety of faith. In the Qu’ran 18, there is a long description of Alexander (“the two-horned one”) building the physical wall between the mountains. In many other Muslim texts, Gog and Magog are short, dog-like people who each make one thousand offspring. A common feature is that they use on of their huge ears as a blanket to sleep on. Once again, it when the imagery becomes less intuitive that I take notice. Having Gog and Magog be hairy little animalistic people makes sense, as it's a piece of clearly value-laden ethnography. The inclusion of the huge ears, however, stands apart from features such as sharp teeth. Hair signifies wild behaviour, and teeth can signify dangerousness. Large ears just signify strangeness, which calls to mind the talking babies – both features are evil not because they actually harm anybody, but because they harm God's image of the world.
Like the Judeo-Christian traditions, in Islam Gog and Magog are legion, an uncountable amount of
people. Once again, they are cannibals (a quality that seems universally abject). Their origins however, are slightly different. Van Donzel and Schmidt include a passage from Ibn Hadjar, who engages an argument regarding Gog and Magog's lineage. “It is said that Gog and Magog are Turks, as al-Dahhak maintains, but it is also said that Gog is a Turk, and Magog is a Daylam. Ka'b says that they are children of Adam but not Eve. But this is refuted because prophets do not have nocturnal seminal emissions” (61). This passage was very telling for me on how religious myths and arguments are made. Gog and Magog cannot be made from Adam's seed hitting the dirt, not because such a thing is biologically and logically impossible, but because of the “fact” that Adam could not have had the emission in the first place. The implication is that if he had, it really could have happened. It's interesting that certain religious beliefs are refuted with logic and a strange form if internal consistency.
Von Danzel and Schmidt also include part of the Islamic text The Bihar, which states that Gog and Magog try to break through the barrier every day, and God magically replaces it every night, until one day someone uses the phrase “God Willing” (Inshallah) which opens the gate. It is God who would implant this mind into the Magog's head. This idea that a two words are the key to ending the world, and that God has just to let them pop into someone's mind is a fascinating one, and one I'll discuss shortly. A passage from Abu Sai'id al-Khudhri's Musnad is also included. It mentions that the
…corpses will be eaten by the beasts [Ezekiel] or, according to other traditions, they are carried off to the sea by rain which purifies the earth. The Muslim who comes out to the fore and will cry out: “Oh community of God! Are you not rejoicing? God has protected you from your enemies.”
To me, this encapsulates the cognitive dissonance believers must have regarding the apocalypse. They are grateful to God for saving them from the harm he caused. It is like someone crashing into your car and then pulling you out the wreck – you can only used the term “saved my life” somewhat loosely. God is responsible for all of these actions, from the building of the wall, to the breaking of the wall, to the rampage of the wall-breakers to their death.
[then there was a bit which is sort of uninteresting to general readers]
Works Cited:
Donzel, E. J. Van., Andrea B. Schmidt, and Claudia Ott. Gog and Magog in Early Eastern Christian and Islamic Sources: Sallam's Quest for Alexander's Wall. Leiden: Brill, 2010. Print.
Ezekiel. New International Version. Web.
"Sura 18, The Cave (Al-Kahf) Quran The Final Testament, Translated by Rashad Khalifa, Ph.D." Masjid Tucson.org: Introduction to Submission to God Alone / Islam. Web. 17 Nov. 2011. <http://masjidtucson.org/quran/noframes/ch18.html>.
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