The End Before the Messiah-Ezekiel's Prophecy About a Huge Army-Gog and Magog: Is It IS?

 Nadene Goldfoot                                                                  

With the advent of ISIS's development from Syria into Iraq and being so close to Baghdad, Israel is  being threatened by this most  horrible of all terrorist groups.   If they succeed in taking Baghdad, they've made it known that they will also take over Damascus,  Jordan and Israel.
                                                                               

                                                 Abu Akr al Baghdadi-leader of IS (Islamic State).
                                                     
Albert, a friend of mine wrote ": "The emergence of the ISIS-led Caliphate is a clear pre-Messianic sign that will bring in the so-called Wars of Gog and Magog, as described in Ezekiel 38. Here is an extract that shows the reunion of these states forming the Caliphate of the end of days: "and I will turn you about, and put hooks into your jaws, and I will bring you forth, and all your army, horses and horsemen, all of them clothed most gorgeously, a great company with buckler and shield, all of them handling swords: Persia, Cush, and Put with them, all of them with shield and helmet". Persia= Iran, Cush= Africa (conflicts are already occurring all over there), Put= Babylonia (Iraq/Syria/Jordan/etc.)... Future will tell..."
                                                                        

So I turned to Ezekiel 38 in my Tanach (Bible)  and read this book, a book of tragedy but not despair, for this prophet tells us that Israel will rise again and return to its home.  There, in Jerusalem, it will assume a new and eternal name:  "Hashem is there".  The fact is that Ezekiel was talking to Jews who had been kidnapped and taken to Babylon, and Ezekiel was right.  Israel has risen again, and the world is rather shaken up about it.  What?  a prophet from the "Old Testament," prophecies are coming true?  They didn't think this could ever happen.  But then again, who would think in the year 2014 that a Caliphate would be born again and that they would be so brutal and bloodthirsty, disregarding  the states of Syria and Iraq, and the lessons they had been brought up with  by their own teacher, Muhammad.  The Babylonian Empire fell with the invasion of the Romans into the land.  

Ezekiel lived in the days of  Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon who also had a conquering army.  He destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem.  Jews never dreamed that could happen.  At that time, Ezekiel witnessed a change in the Jewish people as having become sinful.  Now that they were in exile, they had lost hope and believed that they had lost their share in the G-d of Israel.  Were they still a part of his people after he let Nebuchadnezzar take them away?  

Ezekiel was a prophet of hope and rebuke.  He spoke to those Jews remaining in the destroyed Jerusalem, too.  He shared everyone's suffering because his own wife died in the plague that hit.  He had told them that G-d would pick up Israel from the nations and purify it and replace their stubborn heart with a warm and feeling heart, and a humble, battered group of Israelites would rise and dwarf the haughty.  His vision of bones rising and coming back to life is that of an Israel becoming a vibrant new nation!    It's now happened!

In his prophecy, Judah and Ephraim are united again with a descendant of David as their king with the Land of Israel as their home and with G-d.   Judah was the largest of the 12 tribes of Jacob and was the southern part of Israel that broke away after the death of King Solomon.  Jews get their name from Judah.  The other 10 tribes were taken away by the Assyrians, leaving a huge vacuum in Israel of its best people.  

Ezekiel, son of Buzi, a Kohen (J1 DNA) ,  was one of those Jews exiled from Jerusalem to the land of the Chaldeans (Babylonia) and was by the river Chebar.  .  In the 30th year of exile, which happened 2 times-the first time in 597 BCE and again 11 years later in  586 BCE.  He was a member of the priestly family of Zadok and most likely served in the Temple before its destruction in 586 BCE.  Ezekiel was among those people exiled before then, for it went on for quite a few years.  He was taken to Tel Abib on the river Kebar in Babylonia where he was touched with prophecy.  This is how it happened.

Ezekiel said the heavens opened up and he saw visions of G-d.  This was in the 30th year of the 4th month on the 5th day that it happened.  By the 5th of the month, which was in the 5th year of the exile of King Jehoiachin(598-597 BCE as king) , he heard the words of G-d. 

One prophecy was when the words of G-d came to him saying, "son of man, look towards Gog of the land of Magog , the prince and leader of Meshech and Tubal.  (Ezekiel 38-39). Tubal-Cain was the first craftsman in iron and copper, son of Lamech. Lamech according to one tree, was the descendant of Seth and father of Noah (gen. 5:4-29).  According to another tree, he was the descendant of Cain.  (Gen. 4:18-24).  He had 2 wives:  Adah and Zillah, and 3 sons: Jabal, Jubal and Tubal Cain, the founders of civilization.   The  name is connected with the tribe of Tubal whose members were noted as copper miners and workers. (Genesis 4:22).  

  The king is Gog and the country is Magog.  Gog's downfall is predicted.  Can this  leader of ISIS (IS), Abu Akr al Baghdadi,  be Gog that is predicted? It says he will attack the Land of Israel as the head of the armies of many peoples.  This is to all come about, according to our Talmud, before the coming of the Messiah.  It's interesting that Jews, Christians and Muslims all are awaiting the Messiah foretold about in their respective religions.  All three religions tell about this war of Gog and Magog.  Remember, it was first told by Ezekiel in c597 BCE.  That's a good 600 years before the Christians were even Christians and 1,200 years before the Muslims were even Muslims.  

The tribe of Judah and the tribe of Ephriam are to be united again?  We know that Judah was the largest tribe of 12, from the son of Jacob and Leah.  Ephriam was the son of Joseph and Joseph was the son of Jacob and Rebecca, the woman he first fell in love with that was so beautiful.  Rebecca and Leah were sisters.  Of course, Jacob was the son of  Isaac, son of Abraham by Sarah.  All of the 12 sons and their male offspring should be of the J1 haplogroup of DNA.  This is predicting a unification of the tribes of Israel as being one again.  Picking out just Ephraim might be inferring that not all will be united when hit by this army.  I note that Manasseh, Ephriam's brother,  was not included in the return, nor were the tribes from the handmaidens of Leah and Rachel mentioned.  

The prophecy went on about the army coming. " Persia (Iran), Cush (Africa), and Put (Babylonia: Iraq, Syria, Jordan )  will be with them." They will have their uniforms and protection on.  

They will have people standing with this army:  Gomer and all her cohorts, (  However, GMR is well known to the ancient world as Gimarrai (GMR) of north central Asia Minor (Cappadocia). These people are also known as the Cimmerians (KMR, note the change in gutturals from "G" to "C"). This seems to be the simplest, most obvious interpretation.). The house of Togarmah (Togarmah is among the descendants of Japheth and is thought to represent some people located in Anatolia.   Medieval traditions variously claimed Togarmah as the mythical ancestor of peoples in the Caucasus and western Asia, including the Georgians, the Armenians and some Turkic peoples.) in the uttermost parts of the north, and all its cohorts-many peoples will be with you.  Prepare and make ready for yourself, you and all your hordes that are mustered about you, and be a guardian for them.    

So "Gog will come up against Israel with many peoples from the furthest north."  This could be referring to Russia and Norway, places that have been hard against Jews.  G-d will punish them  "with pestilence, and with blood, and with overflowing rain,"  This sounds like the Ebola virus from Africa and flooding.  For seven years the inhabitants of Israel will use the weapons of the enemy for fuel.

"They will attack simply out of a lust for violence and with the intention of destroying a peaceful kingdom. Indeed, other prophets prophesied about a people that would come up from the north to besiege Israel in the end of days, but Ezekiel, who prophesied after the destruction of the Temple, fixed the date of the last war after the ingathering of the exiles and the rebuilding of Jerusalem."  IS is coming from the north.  How far they get remains to be seen if Babylon can hold out.  

The war of Gog and Magog is seen as a war against G-d.(Gog is merely an official title or general designation for any enemy of God's people.).    It certainly may be as it is led by a Salafi Muslim who has extreme ideas about what is right and wrong in Islam.  They have been killing people viciously who are Muslims, so think what they will do to non-believers.  The Kurds are holding out, however way in the north of Iraq, and the army of Iraq is doing much better.  Fear is used by these violent people.  Maybe they're getting over their first fears of them.  Maliki, president of Iraq, a Shi'a, is offering amnesty to all Sunni's fighting against him, and " gave warning on the threat posed by the Islamic State, saying that "no one in Iraq or any neighboring country will be safe from these plans"

ISIS was known about in 1995.  This is what the religious body of Sunnis said. " Nothing justifies transposing this kind of attitude onto our scholarly resources in Islam, whether it is called "Islamic Movement", "Salafism", or something else, and the sooner we leave it behind, the better it will be for our Islamic scholarship, our sense of reality, and for our din. "   Just recently IS went through Iraq and slaughtered over 30 Sunni Imams.  


Resource; http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/judaica/ejud_0002_0007_0_07466.html
New Jewish Encyclopedia
http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/iraq-turmoil/iraqi-terrorists-appear-show-troop-massacre-bloody-photos-n131731
http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/iraq-turmoil/u-s-bolsters-security-baghdad-amid-escalating-violence-n131661
http://www.aljazeera.com/category/city/baghdad
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2014/07/iraqi-pm-offers-amnesty-rebel-sunni-tribes-20147216226759995.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Togarmah
http://www.biblicalstudies.com/bstudy/eschatology/ezekiel.htm

http://www.masud.co.uk/ISLAM/nuh/salafi.htm

The Law of Return to Israel: Who and When Jews Returned

Nadene Goldfoot                                                                    

Jews suffered greatly when Jerusalem was taken by the Romans in 70 CE.  They were taken to Rome or other places as slaves.  Some managed to remain in Judah while others scattered to other parts of the Middle East.  It wasn't till May 14, 1948 that Israel was again re-created out of what the Ottoman Empire had taken of what was renamed as "Palestine."  This was because of the WWI when the Ottomans had lost the war-being they were on Germany's side

                    Israel is for the Ingathering of the Exiles

The Law of Return of 1950 gave legal sanction to all immigrant Jews. Israel was created as a haven for Jews who had suffered for 2,000 years from anti-Semitism in other countries for being what they were;  Jewish.  Judah  had been occupied by the Romans.  Jews had been blamed for killing Christ by causing him to be crucified, which was something that the Romans had done to thousands of Jews in Judah,  but Jews were blamed anyway being he had been Jewish even though they had denied causing this.   Jews had been the object of attacks by the Crusaders, the Spanish Inquisition, and then the Holocaust and actually were expulsed from countries or forcibly converted to Christianity.  Some communities had been annihilated even before the Holocaust.  They had not had the rights of citizens in these 2,000 years until after WWI.  In the Middle East they were treated as Dhimmis, which were not 1st class citizens.  There they were penalized in many ways for being Jewish.  The one country of safety was the USA, which had its share of anti-Semitism.
                                                                         

               Rome, parade of displaying Jewish artifacts stolen from Jerusalem

Now, what is a Jew?  There is no legal definition.  There are halachic concepts (rabinical law) and sociological ones.  By halacha, a Jew is a person born of a Jewish mother.  They can also be Jewish by conversion to Judaism.  Under 1970's amendment, the Law of Return grants Israeli nationality also to the spouse of any immigrant Jew and his descendants for 2 generations and to their spouses equally whether they were Jewish by halacha or not.
                                                                           

The population of Israel in May 1948 was 650,000.  By May 1972 it was 3,164,000.  This shows that 1,400,000 were immigrants (olim).  Immigrants entered in 4 large waves of immigration.  They have continued to arrive throughout all these years according to their own needs as well.

1.  May 1948-end of 1951:  754,800 came from :
     a. Holocaust in Europe mainly from Poland, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia.
     b. Iraq (121,000 out of 130,000); Yemen (44,000 out of 45,000); Libya (30,500 out of 35,000).

2. 1955-1957:  165,000 came from:
     a. Morocco and Tunisia
     b. Poland and other countries such as Romania

3. 1961-1964:  215,000 came from:
    a. Eastern Europe
    b. North Africa

4. 1967-to end 1972; 200,000 on came from:
   a. North and South America
   b. Western Europe
  c. Soviet Union
                                                                     

1981:  Here I am in my Sachnoot apartment in Safed sitting on my bed-with pillows to look like a sofa in front of my barred window.  That's because we are on the ground floor.  We just moved in after living in Haifa for 10 months attending the ulpan (school).

5.  1980-2013 My husband and I made aliyah in 1980  and were in a large group of teachers of English from the Soviet Union.  We were one of the few actual professional teachers from the West and went through a 10 month program to earn our certification to teach English in Israel first.  There were over 40 in our class that was later divided into Hebrew language groups to bring us up to a level of higher ability.

19,135 olim arrived in 2011
18,691 olim arrives in 2012
Of them 2,432 were from Ethiopia.  Western Europe olim were 3,243 in 2012.  Soviet Union olim were 7,755 and France olim were 1,907.  North America had 3,512 olim in 2011 and 3,389 in 2012.  The UK had 560 in 2011 and 698 in 2012.

 The census now shows that there are 6 million Jews and 1.7 million Arabs living in Israel.  As conditions have become worse towards Jews in France and Sweden with much anti-Semitism, they have been forced to move to Israel. About 3 years after we arrived, Ethiopians were coming to Safed.
                                                                       

                                                               Ethiopian immigrant
   
6.  The Lost 10 Tribes of Israel:-taken by Assyria 721 BCE and Babylon 597-586 BCE
     a. Returning from Ethiopia
     b. Africa-Masai
    c. Asia-Myanmar(Burma), Bnei Israel from Bombay, India, Bnei Menashe of India
    d. Middle East, Mashadi of Mashad, Iran

In integrating Jews from 2 separate cultures from the East (Sephardis, Mizrachim) and from the West (Ashkenazis) ,  we find that the  half of the immigrants that came from Muslim countries in North Africa and Asia had to live in poverty and  the basic values were those of a traditional and authoritarian society similar to the Muslim country they had left.  Most had very large families.

The other half came from European and American countries where the basic values were of a modern democratic and technological society.   This caused a cultural gap which gave immigrants from the developed countries an advantage over the Jews from the Muslim countries so the administration had to be devoted to narrowing this gap.

Education has been the means to do this.  Only 13% of children in 1956 from Asia and Africa attended high school  but by 1969-1970 there were 44% attending.  At the same time, children from Europe and America had 41% attending in 1956 and this went up to 77% by 1969-1970.   By 1970, 18.5% of marriages taking place were of mixed cultural origins.  In other words, the means to even out the disparity was through marriage.  It has increased since then.  Another means is through serving in the IDF.  It has erased differences in sex and in origins.  A Jew is just a Jew today in Israel, back to the way we were before 70 CE.  No differences.

The big population centers in Israel were in the coastal regions between Tel Aviv and Haifa.  New towns and development centers have been built.  This is where many of the immigrants have settled.  They have gone to Eilat, Dimona and Arad in the Negev; Kiryat Gat, Ashkelon and Beit Shemesh in the center;  and Karmiel which is almost all American and Kiryat Sh'mona in the Galilee.  I settled in Safed which is also in the Galilee simply because it reminded me of Oregon with all the fir trees and because it was higher up.  We went where jobs were available.  Being a teacher, I found that Jerusalem, which is a highly desirous city to live in, was already full of teachers and a more expensive place to live.  Teachers were wanted in development towns.  Israel managed to send Russians to the desert and Ethiopians to Safed where it was very cold, but they had to consider where available housing was at that time of immigration.  It gave us lots to laugh about.  Russians preferred to be in Tel Aviv where culture was at the height with music and theater.  We all had our preferences.

It is important to Israel to reclaim Jews who have been found to be still practicing Jewish  beliefs after all these years of separation.  They have been studied by rabbis and even have taken dna tests for their proof.  Through one or both of these tests, they have been accepted as one of our Lost brothers' descendants.  This has been prophesied in the Torah to happen at the end of days.  It's very exciting to us to find that many are still living and claiming their proud connection to the rest of us.  To me, they have gone through much pain to continue their heritage.

Resource: Facts About Israel, Division of Information, Ministry for Foreign Affairs, Jerusalem
http://www.jewishvoice.org/messianic-education/messianic-vision/lost-tribes-of-israel.html
http://jewishfactsfromportland.blogspot.com/2012/11/india-burmas-lost-menashe-tribe-of.html
http://jewishfactsfromportland.blogspot.com/2012/12/lost-tribe-of-israel-living-in-india.html
http://jewishfactsfromportland.blogspot.com/2012/04/10-lost-tribes-and-what-happened-to.html
http://www.jta.org/2013/01/21/news-opinion/world/israel-sees-slight-drop-in-jewish-immigration
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Return