The Word Made Fresh
1“As for you, son of man, prophesy against Gog. Say, ‘This is what the LORD God says: I am against you, Gog, chief prince of Meshech and Tubal. 2I will turn you about and push you up from the earth’s remotest lands, and lead you against Israel’s mountains. 3I will knock your bow from your left hand and make you drop all of your arrows from your right hand. 4You and your soldiers and your people will fall on Israel’s mountains. I will hand you over to be devoured by the birds of prey and the wild animals. 5You will die in the open fields. I have spoken,’ says the LORD God. 6I will set ablaze Magog and the people who think they are secure in the coastal lands. Then they will know that I am the LORD.
7“I will make my sacred name known to my people Israel. I will not allow my sacred name to be trashed any longer. All the nations will know that I am the LORD, the Holy One of Israel. 8The day of which I have spoken has arrived,” says the LORD God.
9“Then the residents of Israel’s towns will go out and gather the weapons – the shields and bucklers and bows and arrows and swords and spears – and burn them in fires for seven years. 10They won’t need to gather wood in the countryside or cut down trees because they will have plenty of wood for their fires in the weapons they gather. They will ransack those who looted them and plunder those who plundered them,” says the LORD God.
11“On that day I will provide a burial place in Israel for Gog in the valley of those who travel east toward the sea. Gog and all his followers will be buried there, and it will be known as the Valley of Gog’s followers. 12It will take the Israelites seven months to bury them so that the land will be cleansed of them. 13All the people of the land will help with their burial, and they will be honored when I demonstrate my glory,” says the LORD God. 14“They will assign servants to the duty of searching the land and burying any travelers who are still there. Then the land will be clean. They will search for seven months. 15As travelers pass through the land, whoever sees a human bone will mark its place so that the buriers can bury it in the valley of Gog’s followers, 16and the buried followers of Gog will be a display that will cleanse the land.
17The LORD God says, “As for you, son of man, speak to all the birds and all the wild beasts and tell them to gather from every direction and come to the sacrificial feast I am preparing for them. It will be a great feast on Israel’s mountains, and you will have plenty of meat and blood to feast on. 18You will eat the flesh of the strong and drink the blood of the nobles of the earth as you would dine on rams and lambs and goats and bulls from Bashan. 19You will eat fat until you are full and drink blood until you are drunk at the feast of sacrifice I am preparing for you. 20Horses and charioteers, warriors and soldiers will fill you at my table,” says the LORD God.
21“I will demonstrate my glory among the nations. All the nations will see the judgment I have carried out and the hand I have laid on them. 22The people of Israel will know that I am the LORD their God from that day forward, 23and the nations will know that Israel went into captivity because of their sins, for they had dealt with me falsely. That is why I turned my face from them and handed them over to their enemies and they died by the sword. 24I dealt with them because of their sin and their filthiness. I turned my face from them.
25“But now I will restore the fortunes of Jacob,” says the LORD God. “I will have mercy on the whole house of Israel, and I will jealously guard my sacred name. 26They will remember their shame and their treachery when they are living in their land with no enemies to fear. 27I will bring them back from where they have been scattered among the nations. They will become a display of my holiness in the sight of many nations. 28Then they will know that I am the LORD their God because I sent them into exile and then gathered them together in their own land, leaving none of them behind. 29And when I pour out my spirit over the family of Israel I will never again turn my face away from them,” says the LORD God.
Commentary
1-6: Ezekiel is to prophesy against Gog, announcing that God is going to drive Gog into the mountains of Israel. He describes a soldier mortally wounded, dropping his bow and arrows and falling on the mountain along with his comrades, their dead bodies picked by the birds.
7-10: The outcome will be that Israel and all the nations will know the LORD. The people will come out and burn the weapons and use them for kindling for their fires. Ezekiel is assuring the exiles that, once Israel is restored, God will not allow another nation to conquer and plunder them as had Babylon.
11-16: God will designate a certain locale as the graveyard of the bones of Gog’s soldiers. “The Valley of Gog’s followers” is an attempt to translate an obscure term in Hebrew. Suffice it to say that the location is unknown, at least to us. Elaborate plans are made for the bones to be gathered over a period of seven months. Almost comically, we see people putting up signs where they have spotted bones so the bone-gatherers will be sure to collect them — remember that in their culture touching a human bone makes one unclean until the evening and unavailable for social gathering, so it makes sense for the job to be assigned to specific individuals rather than have the whole populace out searching for them.
17-20: This section seems to be misplaced; it is a description of the feast of the birds and animals on the enemy corpses as mentioned back in verse 4. Ezekiel can’t resist the most explicit descriptions of the bloodiest scenes.
21-24: All of this, of course, is to demonstrate to all the nations that Israel didn’t go into captivity because the LORD was weak, but because the LORD arranged for them to be conquered for their disobedience.
25-29: And the people of Israel will have ample reason to trust God more than ever. One reason modern “scholars” try to find the identity of Gog among modern foes (Gog is Russia, or Gog is the United Arab Emirates, etc.) is because the battle has never taken place as described in Ezekiel. They confuse the battle against Gog to be the same thing as the Battle of Armageddon in Revelation. Therefore, some readers assume the defeat of Gog must still be in the future; they always imagine it to be in their immediate future. My understanding of these two chapters is simply that God is seeking to assure the exiles that once they are allowed to return to the land they will do so under God’s protection.
Takeaway
These passages in Ezekiel are so violent it is hard to imagine that it is God’s words as he has received them. It may be more likely that this is Ezekiel’s understanding of God’s words as a man who has been sent into exile and is trying to help his fellow countrymen place things into perspective in the hand of God.