Armageddon Outta Here

"All the armies of the world could maneuver their armies on this vast plain . . . There is no place in the whole world
more suited for war than this . . . [It is] the most natural battleground of the whole earth."
-- attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte, before the Battle of Megiddo (1799)

Napoleon was, as usual, playing to his audience; the "vast plain" below him was the Plain of Megiddo, or, as the book
of Revelation has it, "Armageddon." For a term that appears only once in the Bible, it has carved out (conquered) quite
a space in the minds of even the most sophisticated moderns. Perhaps it is merely the tensions of the nuclear age that
sustain its currency, or perhaps there is something else built up below the "hill of Megiddo." Let's look up the hill and
across the plain, then, mapping the territory and scouting out the hosts of the enemy.

"For they are the spirits of devils, working miracles, which go forth unto the kings of the earth and of the whole world,
to gather them to the battle of that great day of God Almighty . . . And he gathered them together into a place called in
the Hebrew tongue Armageddon."
-- Revelation 16:14-16

"Armageddon" is almost always glossed as a sloppy Greekification of the Hebrew "Har-Megiddon," the "mount of
Megiddo." Megiddo was a city in northern Israel, about 40 miles southwest of the Sea of Galilee and 30 miles east of
the Mediterranean. Founded in the third millennium B.C. and occupied by Canaanites, Egyptians, Midianites, Hebrews,
Assyrians, Babylonians, and Persians, it was finally abandoned after Alexander's conquest of the region in 332 B.C.
Megiddo, annoyingly for glossers everywhere, is not on a mountain at all, but on the south side of a plain; specifically,
the plain of Jezreel. (After two thousand years of settlement, however, Megiddo is a fairly impressive little mound,
which might count.) Jezreel (which means "God has sown" in Hebrew, and probably refers to the bountiful wheat
crops in the valley) spreads out east and south of a hilly ridge called Yoqneam, on the foothills of Mount Carmel. The
Kishon ("hardness") River runs northwest through the plain from modern Jenin, past the "choke point" beneath
Yoqneam, to the city of Haifa; Megiddo is a little less than halfway along it. There are three mountains within eight
miles or so of Megiddo: running north to south at the eastern end of the plain of Jezreel Mount Tabor, Mount Moreh
(more of a hill), and Mount Gilboa. The river and the mountains make two sides of a triangle; the "top" of the triangle
is a ridge of hills with Nazareth about halfway along it. Inside this triangle (Mount Tabor-Mount Gilboa-Yoqneam),
the roads from the sea to the desert, and from Egypt to Syria, cross.

Which is why almost every invader of the region, from the Pharaoh Pepi I in 2350 B.C. to the Syrian army in 1973,
has fought a battle near Megiddo. Archaeologist Eric Cline identifies 34 such battles in his book The Battles of
Armageddon and concludes with a strangely straight-faced discussion of the likely tactical dispositions of Gog and
Magog in the ultimate Battle between Good and Evil. This association with battles may have given Megiddo its name
in the first place; it is cognate with gadad, meaning "troops." Megiddo is thus "the place that troops gather" -- it is by
name and by nature the perfect battlefield.

"Do not be too much elated by your momentary victory. If I perish it is by the hand of God, not by yours . . . From
Azerbaijan to the gates of Egypt the whole land will be trodden under by the hooves of Mongol horses, and our
soldiers will carry off in their saddlebags the sands of Egypt."
-- last words of the Mongol commander Kitbuqa at the Battle of Ayn Jalut (1260), as recorded by Rashid al-Din (ca.
1310)

However, apart from the Last Battle, very few of the Battles of Megiddo are decisive enough to hang alternate
histories on. The most important one was the Battle of Ayn Jalut ("the water of Goliath"), which took place, fittingly,
on the spot where David slew Goliath 22 centuries or so earlier. Ayn Jalut is a large spring on the north slope of Mount
Gilboa, at the southeastern entrance to the plain of Jezreel. Here, the Mamelukes of Egypt stopped the invincible
Mongol Empire, dealing the Mongols their first ever battlefield defeat. A Mongol victory would have meant certain
destruction of the Egyptian caliphate; Cairo might have burned as Baghdad did, and Egypt been reduced to penury and
famine with incalculable effects on European trade. Even if the Mongols went no farther (and there is no reason that
they couldn't have duplicated the Arabs' feat of conquering all North Africa or even Spain), destruction of Muslim

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 Egypt might have preserved the Crusader states (quick to ally themselves with the Mongol invaders, who they saw as
Prester John returned) while economically devastating the Italian cities who traded with the Mamelukes.

The other major historical hinge point at Megiddo is Napoleon's destruction of the Turkish Army of Damascus on the
slopes of Mount Tabor in 1799. A tactical victory that was strategically meaningless (since Bonaparte had failed to
take Acre and thus could not hold the territory), had Bonaparte lost his army here he could hardly have parlayed his
victories over the Turks into power in France upon his return. If, during the confused cannonade in the Turkish rear,
Napoleon had been killed, all European history would have diverged even if Kleber or Rambaud had been able to
salvage the battle itself. The death of the future emperor Vespasian (and founder of the Flavian line of emperors) in his
67 A.D. battle against the Jewish rebels, or of Saladin in any of his four battles here, would have had similar (though
lesser) effects.

"When they gave me the peerage, they wanted me to add 'Armageddon' to the title, but I refused to do that. It was
much too sensational, and would have given endless opportunity to all the cranks in Christendom. So I merely took
Megiddo."
-- Sir Edmund H.H. Allenby, Viscount Megiddo (1919)

And so from the clashes of armies we have already descended to the fates of individuals. The most interesting and
dubious death at Armageddon was the death of King Josiah of Judah in 609 B.C. According to 2 Chronicles 35:20-25,
Josiah was defeated in battle by the Pharaoh Necho II and killed. However, even the Chronicler can't really explain
how that happened; Judah and Egypt were allies, and Necho was on his way to whomp up on the Babylonians, who
would destroy Jerusalem in the next century. It becomes even more interesting when compared with the account in 2
Kings 23:29-30, which merely says that "King Josiah went to meet him, and Pharaoh Necho slew him at Megiddo,
when he saw him." This sounds much more like an assassination. Further, the Egyptian records, which record every
minor skirmish as a glorious victory, don't mention anything about an encounter with Josiah, implying there was a
secret to it, something shameful like meeting an allied king in an embassy and shooting him to death.

It may have been something else as well, such as the "royal sacrifice" so beloved of Margaret Murray's imaginary
witch-cult. (The city of Jezreel near Mount Gilboa, as it happens, had a major temple and grove to Astarte, a witchy
goddess if ever there was one.) The Chronicler has Josiah shot by an arrow, taken from the battlefield to another city,
and dying there -- the same m.o. occurs in the deaths of King Joram of Israel and King Ahaziah of Judah, both killed
by Jehu at Megiddo in 841 B.C. The death of Josiah also derailed (or perhaps froze) the Deuteronomic reforms of
Judaism in Josiah's court; the killing was seen ever after as the catastrophic loss of the True King, the equivalent of the
Dolorous Blow or the death of Arthur. There is even some hint that Josiah survived in secret -- the prophecy of Huldah
(which appears in the chapter right before Josiah's murder) says that the Lord will "gather thee [Josiah] unto thy
fathers, and thou shalt be gathered into thy grave in peace." This is not a description of any kind of violent death, at
Megiddo or anywhere else, implying a conspiracy not only against Josiah but against the will of the Lord Himself. No
wonder the Scriptures recoil from setting it down.

"And he said, Throw her down. So they threw her down: and some of her blood was sprinkled on the wall, and on the
horses: and he trode her under foot. . . . And they went to bury her: but they found no more of her than the skull, and
the feet, and the palms of her hands. . . . And he said, This is the word of the Lord, which he spake by his servant
Elijah the Tishbite, saying, In the portion of Jezreel shall dogs eat the flesh of Jezebel: And the carcase of Jezebel
shall be as dung upon the face of the field in the portion of Jezreel; so that they shall not say, This is Jezebel."
-- 2 Kings 9:33-37

And given what the Scriptures are willing to describe in detail, that's saying something. King Ahab, it seems, had
coveted the vineyard of Naboth outside the city of Jezreel. His queen, Jezebel, sorceress-initiate of Astarte, arranged
Naboth's death by stoning, and had the dogs lick up his blood. The prophet Elijah would have none of that; he swore
to Jezebel that "In the place where dogs licked the blood of Naboth shall dogs lick thy blood, even thine." And so it
came to pass; Jehu the charioteer (possibly with Syrian backing) killed not only Joram and Ahaziah but Jezebel,
trampling her to death under his horses. He threw all the bodies into the vineyard of Naboth (although 2 Kings says
Ahaziah, at least, merited burial in Jerusalem), and had the heads of seventy sons of Ahab, and forty-two relatives of
Ahaziah, stacked outside the gates of Jezreel.

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 "The capture of Megiddo is the capture of a thousand cities."
-- Thutmose III, at the Battle of Megiddo (1479 B.C.)
In the vineyard of Naboth, all the blood not lapped up by dogs soaked into the vines; granting no doubt an unholy
fertility in the name of the Lord God ("YHWH ALHYM," or "Yahweh Elohim," kabbalistically equaling 112, which is
to say 70 heads plus 42 heads). Unless Jehu was playing a double game: adding the heads of Joram and Jezebel makes
114, equivalent to "GYHNWM" or Gehinnom, or Gehenna -- an entrance to Hell. If he was able to keep Ahaziah's
head, that would be 115, equal to Azazel, the demon prince of the air -- just the sort of entity to lower down from the
"Mountain of Mountains," Tabor, or from the watchtower of Jezreel (itself perhaps one of the "high places of the
Watchers" such as we encountered in Irem). In this airy context, it's curious that the priestess Huldah (whose -- false?
-- prophecy of Josiah's peaceful death) sounds so much like Holda, the Queen of the Air whose emblem is (of course)
a pack of hounds, suitable for lapping up blood sacrifices.

Jehu's bloody dedication, perhaps, was designed to link the powers of good and evil at Jezreel -- which is to say
Megiddo -- forever, a fate sealed by the eerily similar death of King Josiah 242 years later. 242 leads us to another
twinning; it is kabbalistically the same not only as Ariel (another "airy spirit") but as Zechariah, who just happens to
have written his own prophecy about Megiddo and the Final Battle, in Zechariah 12, which also contains the only other
usage (besides Revelation) of "Megiddo" with the final "n". Zechariah says (twinning again) that "the mourning in
Jerusalem" will be "as great as the mourning of Haddad-Rimmon in the valley of Megiddon." Haddad-Rimmon is a
pagan people, probably the Syrians; interestingly here "Megiddon" is a "valley" rather than a mount ("Har-
Megiddon"); could this be a reference to the inversion at the End Times, when the "high places will be brought down,
and the valleys exalted?" The echoes from Jehu and Josiah spread out; David defeats Goliath at Ayn Jalut, and the
contemptible slave-soldier Mamelukes destroy the Mongol giant there. King Saul asks the Witch of Endor to summon
the ghost of Samuel on Mount Gilboa, on Mount Tabor across the way (mirrored?) Elijah and Moses appear during the
Transfiguration. In 1918, General Allenby precisely duplicates the tactics of Pharaoh Thutmose III in 1479 B.C.
Allenby later observed to the Egyptologist Henry Breasted that it was "curious, wasn't it, that we should have had
exactly old Thutmose's experience." Curious coincidence, or cosmic convergence, as the hosts gather in the
"battleground of the whole Earth," and the heads Jehu planted in his garden at Jezreel (where "God has sown") have
begun to sprout.

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