And the word of the LORD came unto me, saying,
The objections to a literal interpretation of the prophecy are --
(1) The ideal nature of the name Gog, which is the root of Magog, the only kindred name found in Scripture or history.
(2) The nations congregated are selected from places most distant from Israel and from one another and therefore most unlikely to act in concert-Persians and Libyans, etc.
(3) The whole spoil of Israel could not have given a handful to a tithe of their number, or maintained the myriads of invaders a single day (Ezekiel 38:12-13).
(4) The wood of their invaders' weapons was to serve for fuel to Israel for seven years! And all Israel were to take seven months in burying the dead! Supposing a million of Israelites to bury each two corpses a day, the aggregate buried in the 180 working days of the seven months would be 360 million corpses! Then the pestilential vapours from such masses of victims before they were all buried! What Israelite could live in such an atmosphere?
(5) The scene of the Lord's controversy here is different from that in Isaiah 34:6, Edom, which creates a discrepany. [But probably a different judgment is alluded to.]
(6) The gross carnality of the representation of God's dealings with His adversaries is inconsistent with Messianic times; it therefore requires a nonliteral interpretation.
The prophetic delineations of the divine principles of government are thrown into the familiar forms of Old Testament relations. The final triumph of Messiah's truth over the most distant and barbarous nations is represented as a literal conflict on a gigantic scale, Israel being the battlefield, ending in the complete triumph of Israel's anointed King, the Saviour of the world. It is a prophetic parable (Fairbairn). However, though the details are not literal, the distinctiveness in this picture, characterizing also parallel descriptions in writers less ideally picturesque than Ezekiel, gives probability to a more definite and generally literal interpretation. The awful desolations caused in Judea by Antiochus Epiphanes of Syria (1 Maccabees; and Porphyry, quoted by Jerome on Ezekiel), his defilement of Yahweh's temple by sacrificing swine and sprinkling the altar with the broth, and setting up the altar of Jupiter Olympius, seem to be an earnest of the final desolations to be caused by Antichrist in Israel, previous to his overthrow by the Lord Himself coming to reign (cf. the little horn and the "king of fierce countenance," who, "when the transgressors are come to the full ... shall destroy the holy people," Daniel 8:10-26; and the "king of the north," who "shall do according to his will, and exalt himself and magnify himself above every god, and speak marvelous things against the God of gods, and shall enter also into the glorious land, and shall plant the tabernacles of his palaces between the seas in the glorious holy mountain, and the Libyans and the Ethiopians shall be at his steps," Daniel 11:21-45; Daniel 12:1; Zechariah 13:9; Zechariah 14:2-3). Grotius explains Gog as a name taken from Gyges king of Lydia, and Magog as Syria, in which was a city called Magog (Pliny, 5: 28). Ezekiel describes the anti-Christian confederacy which is to assail the Holy Land before the Millennium; Revelation 20:7-9 describes the corresponding and last anti-Christian confederacy which is to assail the beloved city at the close of the Millennium.