Reformational Commentary on Ezekiel 39:12
"And seven months shall the house of Israel be burying of them, that they may cleanse the land." (Ezekiel 39:12)
Whereas the processing for "fuel" of the armour and materiel of Gog's invasion force will take "seven years" in
Ezekiel 39:9, the interring of the invading force's bodily remains
shall endure for seven months, either literally or spoken of here hyperbolically (i.e. perhaps seven literal months +/- a few days).
The fowls of the air and the wild animals summoned by Divine decree to strip the flesh of the fallen in
Ezekiel 39:17 will nonetheless leave a rubble of unsightly skeletal remains,
and it is these that will have to be disposed of manually by the labour of man, to the end that "they may cleanse the land".
Gill comments as follows:
"And seven months shall the house of Israel be burying of them..."
...so long time will the burial of Gog's army take up, because of the multitude of it, and by reason their bones will be scattered here and there; which will require time to gather them together, and bring them to one place: the reason of the burial of them will be, partly out of humanity, which the Christian religion, which will then be embraced by the Jews, teaches and encourages; and partly because of the disagreeable sight and ill smell of the carcasses of the slain, and to prevent the air being infected therewith, which might cause noxious diseases.
Jarchi gives the reason of it, because Gog is of the seed of Japheth, who covered his father's [Noah’s] nakedness, and therefore worthy of a funeral: but a better reason follows, that they may cleanse the land: not from ceremonial uncleanness, a place being unclean, by the ceremonial law, where dead carcasses, or the bones of dead men, lay; for the ceremonial law, as it is abrogated, will now be disused by the Jews themselves, when converted; but from natural pollution, before mentioned. (John Gill on Ezekiel 39:12).
However, the pollution Gill takes notice of in his argument seems destined to be averted thanks exclusively to the scavenging
work of the wild animals and birds mentioned above, so rather this cleansing of the land more prosaically refers simply to the burial
of the mass of unsightly bones.
Some modern commentators (caveat emptor!) have proposed that the exposed bones would be somehow radioactive, derived from an
assumption that the mass slaying of Gog's forces will be caused by nuclear weaponry, but to that I would object as follows:
- It is a demonstration of God's direct intervention on behalf of the newly Christian nation of Israel that is described in Ezekiel 38 and it is not until Ezekiel 39:6 that any allusion to human instrumentality appears to be made, but by that stage it refers to the aftermath of God's interventionist deliverance of Israel, not to the deliverance event itself.
- Nuclear weaponry deployed in northern Israel would surely contaminate much of the living space of that newly Christian land (albeit briefly given that radioactive isotopes decay rapidly), an effect one expects God would not permit.
- The wildlife stripping the flesh of irradiated corpses might in turn become vectors of radioactive contamination through their own bodily secretions and excretions, and would soon succumb to disease and premature death themselves.
- Much of the foregoing would be moot if it be insisted that nuclear annihilation will undo Gog and his forces, because the astronomical heat of nuclear fireballs vaporises bones as well, leaving no remains to be disposed of!
