The timeline of our article goes back to 592 BC, some fourteen years after the first victims of the ‘house of Judah’ (Daniel and company) were taken to Babylon; at this time, the First Chapter of Ezekiel begins with a strange chronological reference: “It happened that in the 30th year,… which was the 5th year of the captivity of King Joachim.” To know any story is to understand its very beginning. Thus, we witness our obsession with the thirtieth year!
We mention the book of Ezekiel beginning only to accentuate the modern reluctance to attend to difficult meanings. Here, in the audacity of the 30th year, Ezekiel’s prose remains unexplained and unsubstantiated except in II Kings 22:8: “…I have found the book of the law in the house of the Lord.” (c. 621 AD)
Apparently, the members of the house of Judah had gone quite some time without a Book of the Law; the book was found in the rubble of the Temple rather by accident. Obviously, over time, through obstinacy, supernatural fear, and fear of entering the corners of the Temple, the Temple authorities allowed the book of the Law to decline in importance; thus the book was left to accumulate dust among the rubble of the Temple. This gives some indication of contempt among the ‘person things’; whose contempt often surfaced in a rebellion against his religious duty.
Upon discovering the Book, Josiah, the king of Judea, remembered how the fathers of Israel had not listened to the Law; moreover, a prophetess transmitted forecasts describing how the inhabitants must suffer grievously for such indiscretions when the cup ‘overflowed’. Ezekiel picks up the story of wandering behavior, and we focus on the mysterious manifestation of Gog and Magog as a future threat in his prophecy; there, we look for the above to establish the definition of Gog and Magog. Leaving no stone unturned, we examine the Old Testament records to explain the unexplained. In doing so, we find the origin of Gog in the environment of Magog, in images that reflect dissolution, enmity, anarchy and disrespect for the ordinances of the Hebrew God.
When we compare Revelation’s Gog-Magog reference to Ezekiel’s Gog-Magog forecast in the middle of the chapters, we have an inherent obligation to start at the beginning and set the context for Ezekiel’s very symbolic prophecy. In the time of Ezekiel, we find the theological circumstances deteriorating, before the Judean captivity, and even up to this 30th year which commemorates the discovery of the Book of the Law. Historically going back from the 30th year extrapolation, our chronological date goes back to 621 BC C. (according to the peculiarity of Hebrew counting). In the BC circumstances, we ‘add to’ rather than ‘subtract from’ to determine the chronological point in Ezekiel’s greeting.
The inference is the disregard of the Law for some time prior to this thirty year memorial; so much so, that the knowledge about the whereabouts of the Book escaped those people supposedly responsible and dependent on the content of the book. From inference from the text, we determine that the Temple was in disrepair thirty years before Ezekiel’s recollections at the time King Josiah was 26 years old. Josiah inherited the throne when he was eight years old; therefore, we could well imagine the snub of responsibility. This point of reference is enough to provoke an immediate reminder of the mindset of doom and gloom in Josiah’s day, recalled by Ezekiel thirty years later, and providing a precedent for Ezekiel’s strange quadruple creatures, who did not turn when they fell. were (Ez. 1:17). .
The Ezekiel theme refers to the images of Gog and Magog with the heritage of Foursome Creatures carried forward to self-destruction but in a symbolic designation of Gog FROM Magog (time of the Gentiles). Daniel provides definition with the equally difficult but harmonious conception of it, where Four Great Beasts describe an inherited essence and definition as Four Great Kingdoms on Earth (Daniel 7: 17-: 23). As an inherited spirituality, the progeny of this Great Kingdom, at agreed intervals of Ten Ages, journeyed without pause or deviation forward to finally end the Old ways in an entirely new theological dimension: limited in time and scope. The premise was a restitution ‘lost in Adam’ and a future punishment at the end of the Ten Ages: encompassing the judgment of the Messianic Age, the resurrection and the end of the theological circumstance.
Ultimately, this harsh promise culminated in a self-imposed punishment; therefore, within those finite and ethnic principles named in Ezekiel 1:5, we come to the symbols of Gog’ and ‘Magog in Ezekiel 37, 38 and 39, a mysterious force destined to consume the Ten Ages of Daniel but as a gogg force of Magog.
The question arises: Will Gog and Magog emerge, at some future date, as hordes from China and Russia, and with two hundred million horses (Rev. 9:16)? Nope! Who would have guessed that the rocky slopes of Israel would graze so many horses? And where would we find so many horses? Two hundred million horses is nearly three times the world’s horse population, circa 2000 AD The magnitude demands another explanation for the hyperbole.
The destruction, to remove the theocratic emblem from the Temple in the first century AD, marked the end of Gog-Magog, the Composite Beast and all corresponding representations.
Gog of Magog represented just one of many pseudonyms used to represent the symbolic character of the Beast as Israel returned to their ancestral homes and joined the end-time battle. Gog assumed physical form only as those tribal bodies harboring adversity at God’s command, and all succumbed to the predestined messianic judgment in the first century AD