BOOK I. OF THE PRIMEVAL DEPOSIT AND ITS DISPERSION. HEAD VII. OF GOG AND MAGOG.

×It were premature, in a head which is concerned with names that have been variously placed by the sacred writers and by those who have interpreted them, to attempt more than a division of the question into the parts of which it consists, and an indication of the degree of confidence which each of the parts will bear; for the names of Gog and of Magog, which are found in the prophet Ezekiel and again in the Apocalypse, and of which the second is found also in the genealogy of the sons of Japheth as it is related by Josephus, have been taken by a considerable number of writers to denote a particular nation, and have been so taken upon grounds of which some are in the text, some in the historian, and some in the interpreter, and the greater part of the labour of the present head will consist in the assigning to each of these its proper class.¹ I should wish it to be understood, at the outset, that I do not undertake to determine the seat of Magog, nor to affirm that the people whom the Greeks called Scythians were the people of whom the prophet speaks; that the identification of the one with the other is that of Josephus, and, after him, of Bochart, and is not mine; and that the place which these names have in the second thesis is a subordinate and a cautionary one, which will be indicated in its proper paragraph. I shall consider, in order, what the prophet says, what the Apocalypse says, what Josephus says, and what has been said by Bochart; and I shall conclude with the objections which may be urged against the manner in which the question has here been divided. NB-30-004 NB-30-011 NB-31-014 NB-32-009

×The prophet is bidden to set his face against Gog, the land of Magog, the chief prince of Meshech and Tubal, and to prophesy against him (Ezek. xxxviii. 1–3).² Gog is therefore named as a person, and Magog as his country; and it is to be observed that the text, in the form in which it stands in our translation, gives these two descriptions in the same clause, so that the person is identified by the land, and the land is known by the person, and neither is described independently of the other. Whether Gog be a proper name, or a title of the prince, and in what quarter the land lay, the passage does not say; Meshech and Tubal are set down as under his rule, and no more. More than this the sacred text does not say; and I enter the place here, and I propose that the other places in which the names occur shall be compared with it as they are collected, and not that this shall be adjusted to them. NB-30-004

×In the Apocalypse the two names stand together, and are said to be those of the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth, and which Satan is to go out to deceive, to gather them together to battle, "the number of whom is as the sand of the sea" (Rev. xx. 8).³ In the prophet Gog is a prince and Magog his land; in this place both are names of the multitude, and the use in the one book is not to be forced upon the other. Whether the writer of the Apocalypse takes the names from the prophet, or from a tradition common to them both, the text does not determine; and I am not able to say that the second supposition, which would give to the names an origin older than either book, is more probable than the first, although it is the one which would be of the greater service to the present argument, and which for that very reason I am the more careful not to assume. It is to be remembered that no people is named in the verse by any name but these; and that an interpreter who, in reading the Apocalypse, supplies from the prophet a seat for the multitude, or from the historian a nation, has added something to the text which the text does not itself affirm, and has done it, for the most part, without remarking that he has done it. NB-30-011 NB-30-004

×Josephus derives a people from Magog, saying that Magog "founded those that from him were named Magogites; but who are by the Greeks called Scythians" (Joseph. Antiq. i. 6. § 1).⁴ That much is a descent and a name, and is of the same kind as what he gives, in the same sentence, of Gomer and of those who were called Gomerites. He adds that the Greeks call these people by another name, which is that of the Scythians; and this is the identification of Josephus, which he reports and does not prove. I enter it as his, and I do not at present pronounce upon it. Whether the people so called by the Greeks are those of whom the prophet speaks as of the land of Magog, his words do not settle; for the historian speaks of a descent from a person, and the prophet of the land of a prince, and a people which is descended from a man may be, and in the history of the families of the earth very frequently is, in a country which has no relation to the land of which any later writer speaks under his name. The place is to be compared with the words of the prophet, and with such as have followed Josephus; and it is the second of these comparisons which, as will appear in the next paragraph, has been made, and made upon grounds which I find myself unable to accept without reserve. NB-31-014 NB-30-004

×Bochart, in the third book of his work, gives the several peoples whom writers have made the descendants of Magog: the Goths, according to Ambrose; the Celts and Galatians, according to Eusebius; the Aquitanians, according to the author of the Alexandrian Chronicle; the Germans, according to the Chaldeans; the Tartars, according to the Arabs; and the Scythians, according to Josephus, Eustathius, Jerome and Theodoret; quod verissimum (which is the truest) is his own judgment upon the last (Bochart, Phaleg, lib. iii. cap. 13).⁵ The list shews only that the writers were not agreed, and it is not without some appearance of reason that a reader who sees six peoples named by as many sets of authors, and one of the six preferred by the compiler of the list, should conclude that the question is determined by the number of the votes; but the preference for the Scythians, which has the authority of four writers, is not stronger than the preference for any of the others, unless the grounds upon which the four are agreed have been shewn to be better than those upon which the rest are separated, and of this I do not find that the list contains the proof. He reads the prophet as placing the land of Magog in Scythia (Ezek. xxxviii. 1–3); but the words of the verse, "Behold I am against thee, O Gog, the chief prince of Meshech and Tubal," name a prince and two peoples, and no country but Magog, so that the placing among the Scythians is Bochart's reading and is not the text's. I enter it as his reading, and I keep the question of the seat open until the testimonies are collected; and I am the more bound to do so, in that the learned author, in the places which I have read, does not appear to have undertaken to shew that the Magogites of Josephus and the land of the prophet are the same, but to have taken it as a consequence of the first. NB-32-009 NB-31-014 NB-30-004

×Bochart, in a place which he has devoted to the comparison of the sons of Noah with the persons of the heathen, makes Magog to be Prometheus, for two reasons: that as Magog is the son of Japheth, so Prometheus is the son of Iapetus; and that Prometheus is feigned to have been fixed upon Caucasus, because he, or the nation of the Scythians sprung from him, fixed their seats there (Bochart, Phaleg, lib. i. cap. 2).⁶ The first of these reasons is a likeness between two fathers' names. The second takes for granted the point in question, that the people of Magog are Scythians; and it proceeds, upon the strength of that assumption, to explain a circumstance of the fable of Prometheus by a circumstance of the Scythian history, which is to employ the conclusion of one argument as the premise of another, and then to represent the second as a confirmation of the first. The prophet, moreover, joins with Magog those who dwell carelessly in the isles: "And I will send a fire on Magog, and among them that dwell carelessly in the isles" (Ezek. xxxix. 6); and isles are not to be looked for upon Caucasus. I do not say that the word isles is in this place to be taken in its commonest sense, nor that the verse may not be understood of regions which are not in the sea; I say only that the learned author, who has used the prophet to place Magog in Scythia, has not, in the place before me, accounted for a word of the prophet which seems to place him elsewhere. I neither adopt this identification nor reject it; the premises are to be separated from the conclusion before it is entered under any head. NB-33-007 NB-32-009

×Bochart carries the name further, and says that the Syrians called the city Bambyce, which is also Hierapolis, by the name of Magog, and that Magog is the Prometheus of the Greeks, by whose son Deucalion, as Lucian teaches in his book on the Syrian Goddess, the temple there was consecrated (Bochart, Phaleg, lib. iii. cap. 13).⁷ The city, he says, was named either for its founder, or by the Syrians in memory of one thought to have come from the land of Magog. Of these two suppositions the second supposes a coming, and the first a founder, and neither is attested. If the Magog of Hierapolis be the Magog whom Josephus makes the father of those "who are by the Greeks called Scythians," the people were carried from the north into Syria; and of the road, in the place before me, nothing is said. It will be observed that the argument has now three stages, of which the first is that Magog is the father of the Scythians, the second that Magog is Prometheus, and the third that Prometheus, by his son, is the founder of a temple in Syria; and that of these each is supported by the one before it, and by nothing else, while the whole is supported by an identification which is Josephus's, and which he reports and does not prove. The matter of the temple is to be taken up under the Waters, where the goddess to whom it was dedicated is considered; and I do not here enter upon it. NB-34-005 NB-31-014 NB-33-007

×The view which I propose, as at present sketched, and with every qualification which the state of the testimonies requires, is the following. The question of Gog and Magog divides itself into four, which have usually been taken as one: the question what the names signify in the prophet, where they are those of a prince and of a land; the question what they signify in the Apocalypse, where they are those of a multitude; the question whether the Magogites of Josephus are the people whom the Greeks called Scythians; and the question whether the name is found, under another form, among the heathen. To the first and second the sacred text supplies an answer for each place, and I do not find that the answer to either is to be carried to the other. To the third the answer is that of Josephus, and, if it is to be received, it is to be received as his; and to the fourth, which is that of Bochart's two identifications, I reply that I neither adopt nor reject, and that I shall not decide until the testimonies of the heathen themselves are collected, in the heads which concern them. What the present head contributes to the second thesis is, as I conceive, of a cautionary nature: that the deposit was carried abroad by the families of the earth, and not by the line of Ham alone, and that the part of the line of Japheth, of which the name of Magog is the only trace that I have yet entered, is a part which the second thesis, in affirming that the corruption was chiefly in the line of Ham, does not deny, but leaves, for the present, undetermined.⁸ NB-30-004 NB-30-011 NB-31-014 NB-32-009 NB-33-007 NB-34-005

×The objections which may be urged against this manner of dividing the question are of some weight, and I do not affect to underrate them. It may be objected, in the first place, that the four questions are in fact one, since the names are the same in the prophet and in the Apocalypse, and that to divide what the sacred writers have joined is to impose a distinction which they did not make; to which I answer that the sacred writers have joined the names and have not joined the uses, and that the use in the one book is that of a prince and his land, and in the other that of a multitude, so that the distinction is made by the texts, and I have only observed it. It may be objected, in the second place, that the identification of the Magogites with the Scythians, being that of Josephus, a witness of antiquity, is to be received without the proof which I require, since it is the testimony of a witness who may be supposed to have known; to which I answer that I do not deny that he may have known, and that I do not require the proof for the sake of denying it, but that a testimony which reports a name given by a third party, the Greeks, is a testimony as to what the Greeks said, and that I take it as such. It may be objected, in the third place, that the list of Bochart, by shewing that so many peoples have been derived from Magog, shews also that the name was widely known, and that this is of the greatest value to the thesis of a dispersion; to which I answer that the objection is just in so far as it relates to the antiquity of the name, and that I do not, in affirming the diversity of the opinions, deny that the name was known, but that the diversity of the opinions is not a testimony to any one of them. It may be objected, in the fourth place, that the isles of the prophet (Ezek. xxxix. 6) may be those of the Scythian sea, or of the Palus, and that the argument which I have drawn from the word is therefore of no force; to which I answer that I have not drawn an argument but have indicated an omission, and that if the isles are shewn to be so, the omission will be supplied, and I shall have the more reason to attend to Bochart. And it may be objected, lastly, that in declining to adopt or to reject I have said nothing; to which I answer that it is something to have distinguished, and that the quarrel of the interpreters, which has been so long, is the quarrel of persons who have not distinguished. These objections, and others which may be urged with less force, will be considered at greater length when the testimonies of the heathen themselves respecting the northern nations come to be collected. NB-30-004 NB-30-011 NB-31-014 NB-32-009 NB-33-007 NB-34-005