The long, complicated and toxically disjointed story of Gog and Magog, from the Old Testament to current anti-Semitic narratives, is fraught with misleading ethnonational, conspiracy and prophetic theorising. It began with the Book of Ezekiel and continued in Christian and Islamic sources which attributed the legend of Gog and Magog to Khazaria.

Magog originates in the Table of Nations (Genesis 10), where he is listed as a son of Japheth, son of Noah, brother of Gomer, Meshech and Tubal and uncle of Togarmah, among others. The name Gog first appears in 1 Chronicles 1:5 in a repetition of the Table of Nations. Ezekiel 38–9 explains that a certain Gog, in the land of Magog, presumably descended from Noah’s grandson, came with a large army, including the descendants of Gomer and Togarmah, against Israel from the vague far north. In Ezekiel, Gog is merely a single inhabitant (or perhaps a tribe) of the land of Magog whose name derives from the original Magog in Genesis 10 (possibly an adaptation of the seventh-century-BCE Lydian king Gyges). Whereas the original Hebrew mentioned ‘Gog from Magog’, the Septuagint rendered the wording ‘Gog and Magog’.

Gog and Magog feature heavily in Judaic, Christian and Islamic eschatologies. In Judaic and Christian eschatologies, they are last mentioned in Revelation 20:8, an eschatological tract about their release from the four corners of the earth by Satan after Christ’s thousand-year reign (the end of time). In his Antiquities of the Jews, Josephus equates Gog and Magog with the Scythians. In Islamic eschatology, Gog and Magog surface in the Qur’an 21:96 (as Ya’juj and Ma’juj), which relates that these two evil tribes will break out of their imprisonment by Dul-Qarnayn (meaning ‘the double-horned’; usually identified as Alexander of Macedon [the Great]) at the end of time and ravage the earth before being wiped out by divine disease.