Example: Hal Lindsay often posits Russia to have a profound role in the End Times by taking aggressive action against Israel. I personally believe this comes from Lindsay’s fear of the spread of godless Communism, and perhaps even a melodramatic view of the world (good vs. evil with political incarnations).
Now I’m going to take a few minutes to trounce Lindsay and dispensational eschatology. Please skip if you don’t want to be bored.
Lindsay’s justification? Conflation of three verses:
Genesis 10:2
Ezekiel 38:2-3
Revelation 20:8
Using the common linkage of “Gog and Magog” in all three verses he assumes personal names become toponyms and makes “Rosh” into Russia, “Meshech” into Moscow and “Tobol” into Tubolsk.
Let’s assume that the “Gog and Magog” in all three are actually places - it is possible that the people mentioned in Genesis (~4000 B.C.) founded kingdoms that became hostile to Israel around Ezekiel’s time (~6th century B.C.) and were either remembered as history or still existed when Revelation was penned (~9th decade A.D.). But most likely, these places were founded and inhabited by ethnic semites and were somewhere in Anatolia (modern Turkey).
Why not Russia?
First, we’re talking 1600+ miles from Moscow to Jerusalem, which would take infantry at least a month if the terrain were flat and easy. But the path is either across the Caucasus mountains and through the territory of Persian and Armenian tribes, or across the Bosporus straits (assuming sufficient navigation abilities, which semitic peoples in 6000 B.C. didn’t have because they didn’t need) and through Anatolian and Thracian territories.
Second, we have no evidence of organized settlement at Moscow or Tobolsk until the 9th and 15th centuries, respectively (and Tobolsk is even farther than Moscow). Not to mention the extreme differences in climate - you’d be hard-pressed to make it as a nomadic pastoralist from the temperate fertile crescent in the hardscrabble steppe of Tobolsk or to endure the long cold winters of Moscow.
Third, the inhabitants of Moscow and Tobolsk are descendants of Varangian, Rus, Kievan, Novogradian and Swedish nomads, all of whom migrated from the north. Their artifacts are functionally and decoratively distinct from semitic artifacts. They spoke Finno-Ugric and Slavic languages that do not resemble (in the least) Semitic languages. While there is some evidence linking most Eurasian civilizations together to a common ancestor in Anatolia (the Proto-Indoeuropean hypothesis), there is no special linkage between the Hebrew, Hittite or Amelkite tribes and the Rus, Varangian and Kievan ethnic groups that suggests purposeful and direct migration.
Fourth, history bears out that the similarities that Lindsay (and others) found are coincidental. The historical record maintains that Moscow was named after the Moskva River on which it sits, and the river’s name comes from a Swedish word meaning “turpid”. It is not until the 17th century that anyone conjectures a link between Russia, Moscow and Tobolsk with Rosh, Meshech and Tobol.
Fifth, presumption of linguistic correctness is the underlying error here. Here you have an American English speaker pronouncing anglicized versions of Aramaic placenames and anglicized versions of Russian placenames and calling them equivalent. Does anyone see a problem with this?
The Russians don’t pronounce themselves “rosh” but rather “rove-skee”.
Moscow isn’t “Mesh-ek” but rather “mosk-va”.
If we suspected linguistic similarities (ie, grammar, syntax, morphology, semantic syllabary) we’d expect to see a systemic consonantal shift from /sh/ to /sk/ between similar words, but we don’t have a long list of syllables with similar meanings to match up, and we don’t have other linguistic similarities.
What’s more likely is that if Gog, Magog, Meshech, Tobol and Rosh are all toponymic (rather than nation names), they exist or existed in Anatolia. That’s marching distance to the lands where Israelites wandered. Similar artifacts, similar languages, similar ethnic phenotypes and genotypes all suggest an underlying cultural link that supports diaspora from a common ancestry.
It could even be that Gog and Magog were long-destroyed cities (as were Sodom and Gomorroah) by the 9th decade A.D. when Revelation was penned, but remained as metaphor for enemies of God (as Sodom and Gomorrah remained as metaphor for lasciviousness) and so would be understood and appropriate within the highly symbolic imagery of the Book of Revelation.
Here, you can have your soapbox back
