Reformational Commentary on Ezekiel 39:11
"And it shall come to pass in that day, that I will give unto Gog a place there of graves in Israel, the valley of the passengers on the east of the sea: and it shall stop the noses of the passengers: and there shall they bury Gog and all his multitude: and they shall call it The valley of Ha-mon-gog." (Ezekiel 39:11)
From this verse above all others in Ezekiel 38 and 39 it seems undeniable that Gog will himself,
and not simply his armies and his allies’ armies, be physically present in the invasion of northern Israel.
This, of course, should remind one of how Russia (the land of Magog - see my commentary on
Ezekiel 38:2) has conducted its invasion of Ukraine, with abundant
rumours of generals
being overridden by Putin and his frequent hiring and firing of replacements.
I am, however, not saying that Putin is himself definitely Gog (although it would be reasonable, as of early 2026, to suspect
he probably is), but rather, that whoever is
in power in Russia when it attacks Israel in the near future, after the West's influence and presence in the Middle East has been
removed in accordance with Revelation 16:12 (as I understand it!),
will be that persona and that he will take a hands-on, over-confident, self-aggrandising role in
leading the invasion.
And Putin himself, though he pays lip-service to being a Christian (by which he means Russian Orthodox, which is of the eastern fork
of the Babylonian Antichurch1),
is still a committed albeit just-about-crypto-
Marxist ideologue2 whose greatest foreign allies are the
rabid Marxists of China's leadership, and therefore even knowledge
of this prophecy would not deter
him (or whoever Gog may prove to be) from fulfilling it, as the infamous case of Hazael in 2 Kings 8:13 shows
(all the more underlining this point, since Hazael
was not an atheist, and yet still proceeded to fulfil the horrible things prophesied of him that he himself spoke of as being the
deeds of a "dog").
Likewise, this Gog, whether or not he be Putin, shall personally attend to his armies in northern Israel, minimally in an
inspection role, but more probably as a latter day Napoleon, for the glory and prestige that would bring.
The foregoing observations therefore shed some extra light on the probable character and traits of Gog.
Not only as leader of Russia will he perhaps be an unreformed Marxist (as Putin certainly
is),
and not only with strident ambitions (as adherents to
Aleksandr Dugin’s
Eurasianist geopolitical doctrines
certainly possess),
and with an unhealthy fixation on natural resources (that industry being
the mainstay of the modern Russian economy and a subject Putin himself is qualified in, having studied it at
university3), this Gog persona seems to also have a
proclivity for a cult of personality.
Sochi, 2016: Putin participates in an ice hockey game, during one of his many staged acts of exhibitionism to impress his domestic audience and gullible conservatives in the West . Perhaps the most egregious of all, though, was his live, verbatim (but cringeworthy) translation of German into Russian, to show how clever he is!
A show-off, a braggart, one who
appeals to the exaggerated machismo
evident in so many Russians (speaking from my experience
living among such for five years!), an aficionado of the grandiose and the bellicose, appealing to what I personally regard as
the Russian inferiority complex
that comes from dented national pride, infuriated and embarrassed by the mess they made of their own country during the disaster
that was the USSR, and accordingly desirous of multi-fronted over-compensation.
This Gog, then, according to Ezekiel 39:11, shall himself be slain and his body positively identified in the land of
Israel, appropriately lying slain in the land he thought to pillage.
The Valley of the Passengers on the East of the Sea
It is added further, that Gog's burial place – and presumably that of his hordes also – is "the valley of the passengers on the east of the sea"; Gill on this is very informative:
...a valley through which travellers [or “passengers” in the KJV translation] used to pass from Syria, Babylon, and other places, to Egypt and Arabia Felix [Yemen], which lay east of the sea; not the Mediterranean sea, which lies west of Judea; but either the Dead Sea, (the Sea of Sodom), a sulphurous lake, to which there may be an allusion (see Revelation 19:20) or the Sea of Chinnereth, or Genesareth, as the Targum, Jarchi, and Kimchi; the same with the sea or Lake of Tiberias and Galilee, mentioned in the New Testament; which sense is approved of by Gussetius [Gill here refers to the French Protestant theologian, Jacques Gousset]; where was a passage from the land of Canaan to the east of the same sea. Calmet [Gill here refers to the French Papist monk, Antoine Augustin Calmet] thinks it stands for the great road at the foot of Mount Carmel, to go from Judea, Egypt, and the country of the Philistines, into Phoenicia [the coastlands of modern-day Lebanon and Syria], which road was to the east of the Mediterranean sea." (John Gill on Ezekiel 39:11).
Calmet's proposal looks like one of the low mountain passes south of
Mount Carmel, itself a low mountain ridge to south of
modern day Haifa, but I take this to be the unlikeliest possible location for Ezekiel 39:11's valley due to the narrowness and small scale
of the location, especially when the invading force is described in terms of a "cloud" covering the land in
Ezekiel 38:9.
That leaves the only viable options as either the
Jordan Valley
in general from the Sea of Galilee to the approximate parallel passing through Jerusalem or the northern Megiddo plains, also
considered by many to be the literal location of Armageddon in Revelation 16:16 or the "Valley of Decision" in Joel 3:14, both of which names are
also metaphors for the final and greatest temporal judgment that shall follow on the nations in the aftermath of Gog's demise in Ezekiel 38-39.
- The Jordan Valley: In terms of easy terrain, any land-based incursion into Israel from Syria, where Russia,
Iran and Turkey currently (as of 2026) have their bases4),
would find the least hilly terrain for tank manoeuvres in that area and it has precedence of such military actions
in the
Six Day War of early June 1967, in which
both Israeli and Jordanian armoured units engaged in a struggle for Jerusalem, which briefly fell into Jordanian hands.
The Jordan Valley, be it noted, is a rift valley and features the lowest terrain on earth, dipping down to 1,300 feet below sea level at its lowest point, at the Dead Sea (rather fittingly, given the wrath of God upon Sodom and Gomorrah, which were located there), and, to me at least, it seems appropriate that the largest and most advanced barbarian (non-western) armies the world will ever see might be brought to devastating destruction there.
In that case, the Valley of Passengers (of this verse 11 of Ezekiel 39) within the mountains of Israel would be the River Jordan valley and would accordingly be one and the same as Joel 3:14’s "valley of decision" (which also stands as a broader metaphor for the final temporal judgment of the nations that the ensuing Armageddon conflict constitutes). - The Megiddo Plains (or "Valley") aka Tel Megiddo:
Tel Megiddo is part of, and typically conflated with,
the very fertile Jezreel Valley in northern Israel,
just inland a little from the Mediterranean Sea and to the west of the Sea of Galilee.
Not insignificantly, this valley (where "valley" would refer to a plain of 5-8 miles in any given direction, surrounded by mostly elevated terrain) was the location of Deborah and Barak's great victory against the Canaanites (a wicked rabble whose sexual sins resemble those of today's West) in Judges 4 and Gideon's subsequent victory over the Midianites, the utterly evil Amalekites and "the children of the East" in Judges 6 (a second rabble who may represent a prototype of the diverse conglomeration of the nations of today's East, combining heathens (Muslims) and secularists in array against Israel).
Because the Gog-Magog event of Ezekiel 38-39 brings on, or is approximately simultaneous with, the conversion of the Jews to Christ, and because that conversion in turn precipitates "life from the dead" to the Gentile church transcendent (Romans 11:15), and further, because the Gentile church must be "dead" when that event happens and therefore in its Sardis (dead) state (Revelation 3:1, which is the present church age - see my article, Why the Age of Missionaries was NOT the Philadelphian Church Era), and finally, because Armageddon in Revelation 16:16 is prefaced by an interjection from Christ in Revelation 16:15 addressing the church with some of the same points He made to Sardis in Revelation 3's opening verses, it becomes obvious that the Gog-Magog scenario is one and the same as Armageddon, albeit I consider Armageddon as a term applicable not simply to the battlefield where the last global war mankind shall experience begins, but also to the whole of that war that shall follow therefrom.
These considerations, therefore, posit the plains of Megiddo as the most likely scene of, variously, the literal Armageddon location of Revelation 16:16, the Valley of Decision of Joel 3:14 and, here in Ezekiel 39:11, the Valley of the Passengers on the East of the Sea, aka, The valley of Ha-mon-gog; and there can be no doubt that it is from this opening scene that World War Three shall erupt, bringing fiery temporal judgment for the last time upon the nations of both East and West, as Ezekiel 39:6 points to.
(A final possible meaning might be a combination of both the plains of Megiddo and the Jordan Valley, since they merge into each other in a narrow strip to the south west of Galilee - see the relief map above; but I think Gog's demise will almost certainly occur in the plains of Megiddo specifically).
Of this valley, this low terrain where Gog and his forces shall lie slain by God's obvious and undeniable direct intervention, the Lord says:
"...and it shall stop the noses of the passengers..."
That is, so foul will be the smell of the rotting corpses that nobody will be able to endure travelling through that region
(without specialist biological-protective clothing and breathing apparatus); as Gill puts it:
It may be rendered,
"it shall stop the passengers [i.e. anyone attempting to transit through the area] from passing that way, because of the multitude of the carcasses that shall fall there", and which is the reason of their being buried out of the way; this sense Jarchi takes notice of. The Targum5 is, "and it is near to two mountains;"
as if this clause described the situation [topography] of the valley. (John Gill on Ezekiel 39:11).
Then, to despatch the putrid remains, active measures will be taken by the Israeli government to bury them; Gill writes:
"And there shall they bury Gog, and all his multitude;"
all his army, such of it as the fowls and beasts had not devoured, and the bones they had left; not his army only, but himself also... [Gill then mistakenly regards Gog as leader of the Turks]... this was not true of Antiochus [i.e. Antiochus IV Epiphanes, one of the vilest men to ever rule on this earth; Gill mentions this to refute the notions of the some that held that Antiochus was Gog]; he died not [in Israel], nor was he buried in the land of Israel.
And they shall call it the valley of Ha-mon-gog:
Hamon signifies a multitude; and this name will be imposed upon the place of Gog's sepulchre, because of the multitude slain and buried here, and to perpetuate the memory of it [so that the name of Gog will stand in infamy throughout the generations of the Kingdom that follow, as will the names of all the godless elites of the West after their mass execution6]: there never was yet a place of this name in the land of Israel, which shows that this event is yet future..." [and as of 2026, it is still future] (John Gill on Ezekiel 39:11).
FOOTNOTES
1. Russian Orthodoxy calls itself "одна истинная вера" ("adna istinnaya vera"), i.e., the "one true faith", but is manifestly a fork of the Antichurch that first appeared in Rome, as opposed to the total repudiation of the Antichurch of Rome that the Reformation was. Orthodoxy has prayers to the "saints", "holy water", full-on priestcraft, idolatry (with abominable icons replacing Rome's abominable statues) and so on; in most respects, it is Popery without the Pope of Rome.
2. Putin is an unreformed, unrepentant former KGB officer, a role only granted to committed communist ideologues or to those willing to pretend they were for self-advancement, and note the following:
- Putin never once renounced communism, which is an odd omission for a supposedly reformed ideologue; by the same token, he never had Lenin’s corpse interred, which would have been perhaps a token gesture, but in choosing rather to let it lie in state to this day for the morbidly curious and the communist ideologue alike to visit and gaze at, his inaction speaks more to his other continued communist credentials than the untaken affirmative action would have to his ostensible abandonment of them.
- He still hosts communist youth rallies and counts as his nearest and dearest allies openly communist China, North Korea, Cuba, Vietnam and Venezuela, along with Islamic Iran and other despotic Mohammedan regimes in central Asia.
- He, or whoever is in power in Russia when it leads the barbarian armies of the East on that appalling resource-grab assault on Israel (which I think will probably happen around the present decade's end), shall be Gog of Ezekiel 38-39, whom the Lord is, terrifyingly, "against" (Ezekiel 38:3).
- In
recent times Putin said that insulting the so-called "prophet" Muhammed is a "violation of religious freedom".
Yes, the man who presides over a Russia whose 2016
Yarovaya law bars any form of Protestant
(whether genuine or apostate)
evangelical operation is preachy about religious freedom when it comes to that horrible heathenism
that has long formed the infamous
Red-Green alliance with Marxism, i.e., Islam.
(Закон Яровой = "zakon Yaravoi" = Yarovaya Law, named after one of is draftees, Irina Yarovaya) prohibits Protestants – not Muslims or other false religions – from evangelising anywhere, even including their private homes, except for within formally registered church buildings). - Putin plays the "Christian" and thereby has beguiled (and accordingly pacified) not just many of the Orthodox devotees in his own country, but also many foolish western conservatives who lack the biblical grounding and discernment to know (a) that Orthodoxy is a fork of the Antichurch that Christ abhors and (b) what constitutes a false professor of Christ.
3. Putin’s thesis was titled, Strategic Planning Of The Reproduction Of The Mineral Resource Base Of A Region Under Conditions Of The Formation Of Market Relations, but it has been alleged (admittedly perhaps by western propagandists) he plagiarised much of it from western sources and is said to be coy about discussing it.
4. Russian bases in Syria according to this resource are concentrated close to the Israeli border; see also this more simplified mapping of Russian military bases.
5. The Targum was a spoken translation of the Hebrew Old Testament.
6. The coming mass execution of the elites (royals included) and their proxies who represent them as past-and-present
presidents, prime
ministers, cabinet members, generals, admirals, judges, civil servants, intelligence agency officers, police, and so on, is (in my assessment) encapsulated in
the slaying of the seven thousand (a symbolic number) and begins in Revelation 11:13 during the "great earthquake" (geopolitical shake-up and
reordering)
when the rulership of the West's premier nation ("the tenth part of the great city") falls into the hands of the godly, including the
"resurrected" (restored) and raised to "heaven" (promoted to a role in governmental power) public witness of the Lord against error,
a witness
that is presently largely dead here in the UK and the rest of Europe through hate speech laws and censorship in the "public square" (i.e.
both online and also in the literal streets of the cities where preaching against Sodom or Islam almost invariably ends in arrest), and is
increasingly being silenced in America also.
But why would godly, Christ-loving rulers execute the above-named persons?
Because their crimes are capital offences, as follows:
- The mass murder of unborn infants through facilitating abortion by legislation and encouraging it through policy and wicked organisations such as Planned Parenthood, dwarfing in scale the sacrifice of infants by the pagans of Canaan and other Satanic cultures of old.
- The mass murder of the elderly (whom the eites regard as "useless eaters") who cannot afford to heat their homes due to oppressive, artificially inflated energy prices to finance Net Zero in the name of a non-existent climate crisis that told us the sea levels would have risen to flood London and New York long ago, a crisis that the elites and their acolytes have reaped great profits from; moreover, countless childhoods and marriages have been ruined as a consequence of the stress from poverty induced by the skyrocketing cost-of-living that the elites' deranged green policies have caused.
- Perhaps the alleged sexual abuse and ritual sacrifice, sometimes entailing cannibalism (as exposed in the Epstein files) of countless children and young people, for their own gratification and ingration with Satan (for power and career purposes).
- The genocide of countless numbers of people through the dangerous mRNA-tampering "vaccine" devised for COVID-19 that dovetails with their published statements about population control, as if humanity consists of herds of animals rather than creatures made in God's image.
- The mass rape, murder, impoverishment, oppression, demoralisation and other forms of suffering thrust upon the native populations of the West by the wholesale immigration of Islamic and other third world devils as part of the elites' social engineering contribution to reshaping and "re-imagining" western society as a hyper-socialist (i.e. Chinese-style Marxist) dystopian hellscape in which everyone is tagged and chipped like cattle, with freedom to dissent expunged forever.
- The failure of the sock puppet governments of the West to perform even the most basic acts of justice, i.e., the execution of murderers, the protection of society from dangerous offenders and illegal immigrants, etc. (See Deuteronomy 10:18).
- Fomenting and foisting godless, Antichristian atheism in the education system and media with the obvious objective of facilitating abominations such as abortion, euthanasia, sex change operations, LGBT, etc.
- Infiltrating erstwhile or ostensible evangelical denominations to subvert them with Marxist-originated ideas such as Situation Ethics (which teaches that the principle of "love" trumps explicit laws against Sodomy, for example, and therefore it is "unloving" and "hateful" to argue against homosexual relations and gay marriage); not content with devising secular humanist laws to facilitate abortion and euthanasia, the elites have also taken steps to murder the souls of as many people as possible!
For all of these crimes, the wicked politicians and, even more so, the ultra rich elites who direct them, must be promptly and without remedy subjected to the death penalty when the Lord delivers them into the hands of His faithful few during the great political earthquake that comes when "life from the dead" transforms His gagged, immobilised public witness against error; and that wonderful transformation comes when the Jews are brought back, by the grace of God, into the church transcendent as Romans 11:15 promises, and, as our study of Ezekiel 38-39 should by now show, this development is tied in with the near future Russian-led attack on an Israel that will have been abandoned and forsaken by its longstanding western allies.
