Ezekiel 38: A Chapter to Remember

Section 1: The Six Day War & Keele University’s ‘Spiritual Think-tank’, May / June 1967

There were only four of us: Ian [now Brother Ian] Cockcroft, of Walkden, Manchester [now of King’s Heath]; Jean King of Birkenhead [now Sister Jean Smith of Wardley]; Sister Judith Wrigley, of Blackpool [now Sister Judith Wilson, of Crewe], and the undersigned – then Brother Andrew Wilson, of Newcastle, Staffs.

We worked hard at University – pausing at 10 p.m., often, to ramble, discussing, during Midnight Walks across the Staffordshire countryside, but our coursework – though good – was secondary to our main purpose – viz. Bible-study.

Then came the Six Day War. We had noticed, spurred on by CBS/ Newsweek/ BBC’s long-term Israel correspondent, Michael Elkins’ graphic reporting of the ‘Drumbeat to War’, throughout the Spring and, especially, May, that Israel was in an increasingly perilous situation vis-à-vis its Arab neighbours. Some, at least, of these were on public record as desiring to “drive Israel into the sea”.1 And we had made loud and clear our understanding of Bible prophecy, within the University Community. A fateful weekend came in late May 1967; we were not sure at first, but it very soon became abundantly clear, that War was declared.

On a Saturday evening, immediately preceding the War, probably either Saturday, May 28^th or June 4^th, there came a knock at my door. Without, stood a delegation from the then Keele Christian Union. The genuine straightforwardness of their enquiry bowled me over:

“Andrew, we know you all know a lot about Bible prophecy; could you explain Ezekiel 38 to us, please?”

In that way, came the beginning of what was to be, for me especially, as a historian, a lifetime’s study of this chapter.

Section 2: Summer vacation, Blackpool, July – September, 1967, and onwards…

Two of the four of us [by 2016, married for 46 years] were – back in 1967 – on the road to being affianced, and so, naturally, spent that Summer together, at my future in-law’s house in Blackpool, Lancashire. Ezekiel 38 now began to be studied in as much depth as was possible for us, with the resources [computers unheard of by normal folk!], and maturity-levels [Judith was then 19; I was 21] available to us unwaged students.

The mists of time — over 49 busy years —  have obscured, to a degree, what we read and/or discovered, what we became suspicious about, and pursued relentlessly in sources we found back in the University Library, what we ‘intuited’, and in what order. However, it went something like this: –

[a] In Christadelphian works, of various kinds, I, as the main historian of our group [Jean also studied History, but, with English], read accounts of the chapter’s interpretation, from various different time-periods. This made me a little suspicious as to why author A selected time-period B for his interpretive scenario, and, therefore, concluded that the nations in the chapter could legitimately be identified with modern-day countries X, Y or Z. I began to ferret away at this; I believed the brethren to be truthful, and that the clashes of interpretation were genuine, but couldn’t proceed much further: “they couldn’t ALL be right”, I remember groaning to myself – so, which to pick?” At this stage my historical training began to kick in. [I was doing a Dual Honours degree in History and Political Institutions, and specialising, in the former, with my Professor, Walter M. Simon, (d. 1971), a Viennese-American Jew, from Cornell, in Historiography]. I concluded that, just perhaps, all these earnest brethren COULD be right if the tribes could be shown to be peripatetic. Incidentally, my Politics professor, Samuel E. Finer [1915-1992; Keele Professor of Politics: 1950–1966, after which Manchester & Oxford], also Jewish, was, first and foremost a historian, whose magnum opus – unfinished [by 2 final chapters] — was The History of Government from the Earliest Times, 3 vols, 1982-1993].

[b] I promptly set to work, and discovered that, indeed, these tribes were nomadic…thus the VAST differences in territorial interpretation offered, to label Gomer, Togarmah, [and the like] was explicable. To my amazement, it seemed that, in the debate about “Who lived where, and when?”, on at least some occasions, arbitrary decisions were being made about the timescale, such that the ‘correct’ candidate-nations could be selected, to suit the interpreter’s pre-selected favourites, regarding the fulfilment of the prophecy.

[c] However, I was promptly up against another conundrum: “If they were nomadic, which interpretation(s) should I pick?” Honesty pushed me straight into what seemed then, and has in 49 subsequent years, as the only honest answer: “We MUST discover where these tribes lived in the days of Ezekiel the Prophet!”

[d]        A lengthy period of frenetic research followed this realisation.

[e]         The results were, at the time, a little odd, and rather mixed, as follows: –

• Virtually none of the territory involved referred to land under the control of the then USSR – a sine qua non, for many expositors – as in titles such as “Christ will bury Russia in Israel”.
• The national boundary-lines extant in Ezekiel’s day were very noticeably different from those which obtained in 1967.
• The territorial positioning of the tribes in Ezekiel 38, in the prophet’s own time, shows they were virtually contained within the Anatolian Peninsula, i.e. in modern Turkey and areas to the immediate East and south-east of Turkey, south of the current Georgia and the Ossetias; I say ‘virtually’, because the ‘boundaries’ of nomadic tribes, which they were, is almost impossible to define. [It is interesting to note that ‘Turkey’ is as definable as ‘The British Isles’ – Turkey’s boundaries being circumscribed by mountains, as Britain’s are by seas and oceans: the Koroglu and Pontic mountains, to the North-West, the Caucasus, to the North-East, the range containing Ararat and Suphan Dagi to the East, and the Taurus mountains, to the South].
• In turn, this conclusion posed its own problems, back in 1967: ‘How does this picture square with the current dominance of the USSR?’; Turkey was in NATO – but the peripatetics in Ezekiel 38 opposed the ‘West’; ‘Both the USSR and Turkey had compact, tightly-drawn, and well-defended borders, so where did the flexibility required of this understanding of Ezekiel 38 come from?’, and so on.
• During the 50 or so years since I began these studies, of course, the situation in geopolitical terms in this area has changed out of all recognition: –
  • The Berlin Wall was breached [Nov. 1989].
  • The USSR was dissolved [Dec. 1991].
  • Splits developed between the USSR and its former Eastern European satellites e.g. Communist rule in Czechoslovakia ended in Nov 1989, in Poland in Jan 1990, and in Hungary, in October,1990.
  • Splits, similarly, developed between the USSR, and its former Caucasian satellites: Chechnya, the Ossetias, the Balkar Republic, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, and so on.

The splinter-states in the former South-Eastern USSR were, in part at least, moslem; NOW the connection with Ezekiel 38 v. 5 began to appear: Persia [Iran], Ethiopia and Libya – putative allies of the Northern host in Ezekiel 38 – all being moslem, too! Furthermore, there was a similarity between the types of Islam preferred in all these places.

Section 3: Turning research to practical use, [1967 – the Present Day]

(a): 1967 – late 1980s

Our first efforts, in 1967, relied heavily on two types of sources: Christadelphian studies in Ezekiel, as borrowed from my future father-in-law – the late Brother Ken Wrigley, of Blackpool, and my dad – the late Brother Thomas Wilson, of Heckmondwike, Yorkshire, and the researches of Professor Frederic Gardiner [1822 – 1889], Secretary of the USA’s ‘Society of Biblical Literature’, and Professor of Divinity, Middletown, Connecticut, USA, as recorded in Dr. Ellicott’s Bible Commentary, on Ezekiel, [Volume V, pp. 199 – 356].

On the basis of these studies, and the thinking in Section 2 above, I prepared a talk:

Ezekiel 38: A Chapter to Remember! which I gave, in many Northern and Midlands towns in England, especially, in the 1970s and ‘80s.

(b): Late 1980s – early 2000s

In May, 1967, the preaching efforts in North Staffordshire had reached such a peak of activity that there was more work than one ecclesia could do, and a new ecclesia, Talke, Staffs, was set up. Judith and I quickly became members of this. By the 1980s, this ecclesia had relocated to Kidsgrove. The members of Kidsgrove were very well aware of the talk I had been giving on Ezekiel 38, and asked me to prepare a full-scale Bible Class paper for them, adopting the same title.

Reinvigorated with this renewed purpose, I reinvestigated the whole subject, utilising different sources – ransacking Staffordshire Library services for the purpose. To my great pleasure, I discovered there was a 99.9% overlap with the findings of my earlier talk.

(c): Early 2000s – Present Day

Having transferred to Crewe, in 1995, I offered to re-research the issue another time; this effort being based on sources available via the Internet. Again, I was very gratified to find a virtually total overlap of findings, compared with prior studies.

By this stage, I was more than a little confirmed in my thinking – especially as World events were moving in such a way that issues – involving matters of ‘Territory’, ‘Recognition’ and ‘Identification’ – matters which, in 1967, had been utter puzzles, were becoming clearer and clearer, and more and more easy to confirm.

In all these matters of fitting 2,500-year old prophecies to modern circumstances, I was really glad I had followed the advice of our university-days’ exegetical mentors, Brother Geoff and Sister Ray Walker of Newcastle, Talke and Kidsgrove. This consisted in not fretting over much about matters of the identification of the objects of prophetic utterances; rather, to ensure that at least the outline of the substance of prophecy was in our heads, so that, when these things began to come to pass, we could indeed ‘lift up our heads, for our redemption drew near’, as the Lord Jesus said.

We have seen this happen in our lifetimes, in the Middle East, with Ezekiel 38, before our eyes. With this general ‘jigsaw framework’ in mind – the ‘major pieces’ which needed to be slotted into their allotted places would seem primarily to include: –

1. How the Middle-Eastern world of c.1900 became the Middle – Eastern World of post-1945
2. Where were the nations of Gomer, Togarmah, Rosh, Meshek, Tubal, Sheba, Dedan and Tarshish precisely c. 600 B.C.?
3. What about the role of USSR / Russia / Vladimir Putin / Putin’s “Inner Cabinet” in all of these matters?
4. Cycles in the M. East: from 6^th /7^th century B.C. Scythians & Cimmerians to Stalin to the USSR & Chechen Wars [1994 on]
5. Where the “Crazies” of modern terrorism fit into the above patterns, & how & why they emerged
6. General Chaim Herzog, the International Institute for Strategic Studies [IISS], Putin and Obama: technology/numbers v Psychology in Modern Warfare
7. The work of Professors Elie Kedourie, Moshe Gammer & Yuri Bregel: being sure of facts, without the time or talent for their research capabilities / expertise of learning abstruse ancient languages, so as to consult all appropriate source-material, in the original.