Ezekiel38chapter 38

The names in the coalition are real places on the ancient map, most of them in what is now Turkey and the lands beyond. Meshech and Tubal appear in Assyrian records as Mushki and Tabal, kingdoms of eastern Anatolia. Gomer matches the Cimmerians, called Gimirrai in Assyrian texts, a people who came down out of the northern steppe. Beth-togarmah corresponds to Til-garimmu, also in Anatolia. Magog is placed by Josephus among the Scythian peoples of the far north.

Those northern horsemen were a live memory, not a legend. Herodotus describes the Scythians as mounted archers of the steppe who swept down into the Near East in the seventh century BC and terrified everyone they met. A great cavalry army coming out of the north was the most frightening thing a Near Eastern audience could picture.

The rest of the coalition is drawn from the other compass points: Persia to the east, Cush up the Nile in what is now Sudan, and Put in Libya to the west. Together the list means an assault from every direction at once.

The setting is described with unusual care, and it is not Ezekiel's own day. It is after many days, in the latter years, against a land restored from war, whose people are gathered out of many nations onto mountains that had been a continual waste, and who now dwell securely — all of them living without walls, having neither bars nor gates. An unwalled country was an unheard-of thing in that world; it means a people who feel no need to defend themselves.

MannaFest reads this as a still-future invasion of a regathered Israel, before the kingdom described in chapters 40 to 48 — the premillennial frame. Others place it at the end of the thousand years alongside the rebellion named in Revelation, and some read it as a picture of all hostile nations rather than a specific campaign; the alternatives are named rather than argued here.

The outcome is not a battle in the ordinary sense. God brings the invader up with hooks in his jaws, and then breaks him with earthquake, confusion in the ranks, disease, torrential rain, hailstones and fire — the weather and the ground, not an army.