Lesson 1 Overview

Ezekiel 38: A Study of Gog and Magog with Dr. Andy Woods

This lesson opens a new series studying Ezekiel 38 and 39, which Dr. Woods calls “The Middle East Meltdown.” It introduces the prophecy of a coming coalition of nations that invades Israel in the last days, and it begins identifying who those nations are. Use this overview to review the key points after watching the full video.

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Living in “Interesting Times”

Dr. Woods opens with the saying “may you live in interesting times,” arguing that our own era qualifies because a coalition of nations continues to surround Israel with hostile intent regardless of which political party is in power. He notes that the prophet Ezekiel foresaw this scenario about 2,600 years ago.

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Ezekiel the Prophet and His Setting

Ezekiel was a priest from the tribe of Levi and a descendant of Aaron. He was carried into the Babylonian captivity, which came in three waves under Nebuchadnezzar: 605 BC (when Daniel was taken), 597 BC (when Ezekiel was taken with most of the people), and 586 BC (when the city and temple were destroyed). Ezekiel and Daniel were contemporaries, both called “exilic prophets,” and both prophesied in Babylon, in the region of modern-day Iraq. Ezekiel received his visions by the Kebar River (Ezekiel 1:3).

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Prophetic Stage-Setting

A key idea in the lesson is “prophetic stage-setting.” Dr. Woods argues that just as God prepared the world for Christ’s first coming (through the Roman peace and Roman roads, and through Alexander the Great’s spread of the Greek language, so that the “fullness of time” of Galatians 4:4 was ready), God is now setting the stage for the events of Ezekiel 38 and 39. He holds that the rapture of the church precedes this invasion, which he will defend later in the series, and reasons that if the stage is being set for these events, the rapture must be even nearer.

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The Plan of the Series

Dr. Woods says the study will proceed in two parts. First, it will work through the five journalistic questions about the prophecy: who, when, why, what, and how. Second, near the end, it will draw out seven points of application for daily Christian life. He reads Ezekiel 38:1-13 to introduce the prophecy, which names Gog of the land of Magog and a coalition including Rosh, Meshech, Tubal, Persia, Cush, Put, Gomer, and Beth-togarmah, coming against a peaceful and unwalled Israel to seize spoil.

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Beginning the “Who” Question

The lesson then starts the first question: who are these nations? Dr. Woods explains his method. He identifies each ancient people group using the Table of Nations in Genesis 10 (which records where Noah’s sons Ham, Shem, and Japheth settled after the flood), then matches those groups to the modern nations that occupy those regions. He insists this is not “newspaper exegesis,” meaning reading current events into the text, and says he will not reference any current event while answering the who question, so the identifications can be made objectively first.

To do this, he relies on three sources: the first-century historian Josephus (in his Antiquities), the standard Hebrew lexicon known as BDB (Brown, Driver, and Briggs), and the ancient historian Herodotus (in his Histories, written around 450 BC).

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The First Names: Magog and Rosh

Working through the list, Dr. Woods identifies Magog, which Josephus links to the Scythians, as the nations of Central Asia, the region of the modern “Stans” (such as Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Turkmenistan).

He then spends time on Rosh. Some treat Rosh as a common noun meaning “head” or “chief,” but Dr. Woods argues it is a proper name identifying a geographical place, pointing to its repeated use (Ezekiel 38:2, 38:3, and 39:1), to the Septuagint, and to scholars such as Keil and Delitzsch, the New Bible Dictionary, the Wycliffe Bible Dictionary, and Gesenius. He highlights that Gesenius, the father of modern Hebrew lexicography, identified Rosh as the Russians back in 1842, long before Russia became a communist or nuclear power, so the identification cannot be dismissed as reading headlines into Scripture. He also notes that the invasion is repeatedly said to come from the north (Ezekiel 38:6, 38:12, 38:15, and 39:2), and that directly north of Israel lies Russia.