Thread by @shahanSean

Many asked on this thread abt Gog & Magog (Heb. גּוֹג וּמָגוֹג; Ar. يأجوج ومأجوج) and if Alexander of Macedon/Ḏū ’l-Qarnayn was associated w/ them before the Qurʾan. The answer is a resounding, “Yes,” and the same Syriac sources again have a key role to play. I'll explain why …

https://twitter.com/shahanSean/status/1131588182804443138

First, who are Gog and Magog? The two names are first attested in the Hebrew Bible. ‘Magog’ appears as a descendant of Noah’s son Japheth in Genesis 10 (important later). Gog first appears paired with Magog in Ezekiel 38:1:

Gog + Magog become associated with a massive amount of speculation about the end times -- they are *still* associated with this speculation. The actual, historical people/lands behind these names are lost to time ...

but how they feature in the apocalyptic imagination across historical time is fascinating, especially how this connects to ethnography. We'll focus on a tiny sliver -- how they came to be associated w/ the people of the North and Alexander's Iron Gates

Flavius Josephus (b. 37/38 CE, Jerusalem; d. ca. 100 CE, Rome), is the earliest author to connect Magog with Alexander the Great (no mention of Gog). Josephus identifies the biblical Magog with Scythians (Antiquities I.122-123) and notes in *Bellum Judaicum* (VII.7,4)

AFAIK, there’s no consensus abt the location of these iron gates—be they the Caspian Gates near Derbent or the Caucasian Gates of the Darial Pass. The important motif is: Alexander built gates to keep out a northern barbarous people (identified w/ biblical Magog)...

This becomes developed as an apocalyptic motif in a series of sources written before/during the early Arab conquests:
Tiburtine Sibyl (ca. CE late 4th cent., Latin)
Jerome (d. 420, Latin)
Alexander Legend [Neṣḥānā] (ca. CE 515/628-30)
Chronicle of Fredegar (ca. CE 650, Latin)

Apocalypse of Ps.-Ephrem (ca. CE 680, Syriac)
Apocalypse of Ps.-Methodius (ca. CE 692, Syriac)
Edessen Apocalypse (ca. CE 690, Syriac)
Chronicle of Zuqnīn (written ca. CE 775, Syriac)
This theme of Gog & Magog kept at bay by an iron barrier appears, of course, in Q. Kahf 18:91-98

For more background, I strongly recommend @SarahEBond 's sarahemilybond.com/2018/11/25/bui…

And more recently, this monograph on an early Islamic expedition to find the wall in the caliphate of al-Wathiq (r. 842–847) by Emeri J. van Donzel, Andrea Barbara Schmidt
books.google.com/books?id=PtxOX…