Correct. Technically Russia isn't brought up until Daniel 12:11 (Russia, Iran vs. Israel), but the story starts 11:36 and continued to 12:11..more details in Ezekiel 38. The invasion of Israel from the north will be Syncthians (Russians), Cimmerians (Crimea), Persia, Germans/Armenians/Turkey/Europe, Libya/Sudan.No one will defend Israel (except the hand of God). Interest the book we are referring to specifically says that Saudi Arabia and ?UAE (Sheba, Dedan, and merchants of Tarshish) will not be in on the attack, but ask why it is being done.
A biblical take on #46, is that the US had to have a super weak leader, for Putin (plus Ergodan, Ali Khameini) to flex their muscles. Putin doesn't care about Ukraine; might just be a test to see how far #46 will respond. At some point, Israel will be attacked from the North by essentially everyone mentioned. I think its interesting how Germany and Russia are so friendly now...cause I wouldn't have predicted it but Ezekiel did.
the problem is that you are attributing this to current national entities based on the ancient people who lived there 2500 years ago.
If "Gog" is a person, a leader, then he leads the "land of" Magog, and is the prince of Rosh, of Meshech, and Tubal.
But it is bad historiography to say that "Rosh" sounds like "Russia", and deduce that it must mean that. "Rosh" is the Hebrew word for "Head" as in Rosh Hashanah.
600 years after the prophet Ezekiel, the Jewish historian Josephus, who is far from a faultless source, says that "Magog" (son of Japeth, son of Noah) are the Scythians. But saying the Russians *are* the Scythians is incorrect, as they descend from the much later Slavs. And many of the people groups of 600 BC are intermixed after successive layers of invasions and migrations. So if the text is evaluated not ethnically, but rather geographically based only on their homeland, then the area is far larger than just modern European Russia.
Even the term Scythian is hotly debated because their history was written by Greeks who lumped many 'barbarians' together. So if you include the vast number of Iranian tribes who were related to the "Scythians" as Josephus would have known them, you end up with a geogrphical area stretching from the border of China (ancient Bactria and Sogdia) across Central Asia, the Pontic Steppe, all the way to Austria, where the Hallstatt Celts lived. Incidentally, there is archaelogical evidence (Scythian weaponry buried in the graves of aristocratic warriors of the Hallstatt D period) to suggest that the Scythians and Celts interacted extensively. So if you toss in the Celts, that would include everyone in Europe south of Denmark and north of central Italy.
That's a lot of countries beyond just Russia. Afghanistan to Portugal.
"Gomer" has been linked to the Cimmerians, and would correspond to Georgia and parts of Turkey, But they are so murky (no real references after the Behistun Inscription) and connected only through questionable Caucasus folk legends and bad etymology (ie the Welsh Cymry = Cimmerrii) we really can't know much with certainty. So you could toss in Asia Minor and parts of the middle east, among others. So again, is the reference to the people themselves, or the land they once lived in?
Meshech is another similar case of lost identity. They are recorded by the Assyrians to be in a similar territory to the Cimmerians - but the Hittites, who would have been their neighbors - don't mention them at all. Most likely they are known to history by a different name.
Tubal, who is sometimes connected to Tubal-Cain, was another descendant of Japeth who knew how to work bronze and iron. The early iron workers, like everyone else I've mentioned here, as well as the Persians who are also mentioned, were Indo-Europeans (they referred to themselves as Aryans).
then throw in Ethiopia, Libya, and the Turkic tribes.
So if you want to be fair about it, if this is interpreted ethnically and geographically, all the cross references indicate that it's a conglomeration of all the Indo-European speaking nations and peoples, The Turkic-descended peoples, and north Africans.
Of course, the Americas were settled by Europeans who descend from all these groups too, and America is not mentioned in scripture unless you want to apply the "Babylon" reference of Revelation........
