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Text in context

 


Ezekiel 38:3

Son of man, set your face against Gog of the land of Magog, the prince of Rosh, Meshek and Tubal, and prophesy against him

 

Thought for the day – The text in context

I love how Scripture keeps surprising me. Yesterday it was whether God can revive his church. Today it's a lesson in context. My mind, anyway, boggles at where the Spirit takes me.

 

Reading today's chapter, Gog, Magog, Meshech and Tubal floated to the surface — and Gog and Magog in particular. Genesis 10:2 lists Magog, Meshech and Tubal as sons of Japheth, grandsons of Noah. Revelation 20:8 has an army from Gog and Magog invading Israel. Read across Genesis, Ezekiel and Revelation, the picture is consistent: peoples from the north, set against the people of God. This is where context earns its keep.

Meshech is usually linked to the Mushki, an Anatolian people the Assyrians recorded fighting from the 12th–8th centuries BCE. Tubal appears in the same sources as Tabal, a neighbouring Anatolian kingdom. Magog is murkier — no clear extra-biblical referent survives, though Josephus later placed it among the Scythians, north of the Black Sea. Put together, the geography points to Anatolia and the lands beyond it: not one kingdom, but a whole northern horizon Israel regarded as remote and formidable.

Ask most people about Gog and Magog, though, and the answer comes back "Russia." That's down to one word: Rosh. In Hebrew it simply means chief or prince — some scholars translate it that way, others read it as a place name. In the 19th century, Rosh got linked to Rus, and from there to Russia. It's a popular reading, but not an accurate translation.

So what do we take from this? First, these nations represent the powers arrayed against God's people. Second, Scripture rewards knowing its background. And third — as fun as it is to speculate about what a passage "really" means, casual handling demeans it. It's the word of God, not a horoscope.


This blog post is part of the Walking the Way Podcast series. All views expressed in this essay are those of the author. This essay is freely available under Creative Commons License with Attribution-ShareAlike, allowing users to share it in other mediums/formats and adapt/translate the content as long as an attribution link, indication of changes, and the same Creative Commons License applies to that material.

This work is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0


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