All the Men of the Bible

Magog [Mā'gŏg]—expansion or increase of family. The second son of Japheth and founder of descendants occupying Magog, or Scythia (Gen. 10:2; 1 Chron. 1:5; Ezek. 38:2; 39:6; Rev. 20:8). The grandson of Noah was the father of those Josephus calls the “Magogites,” and those the Greeks call “Scythians.” When Ezekiel used the terms Gog and Magog, he used them in a historical sense of the future, referring to the Prince of the Northern Confederacy and his scope of rule, and they are thus literally to be understood. Gog is the symbolic designation for the future head of all nations embraced within the Northern Confederacy (Ezek. 38; 39). Magog is the symbolic territory covered. When the Apostle John uses the terms it is to describe the wicked on the earth at the close of Christ’s millennial reign, and is thus to be symbolically understood. Gog and Magog in the Book of Revelation are to be thought of in a moral, not a geographical sense (Rev. 20:8).