u/thorosaurus

There's no lost projection, Fusion is just hallucinating. As you can see, there's nothing there to break link or delete (on either sketch).

I'm making a stock for a factory Ruger 10/22, and none of the blueprints I can find online say what this radius is. Does anybody happen to know?

The TL;DR is I think Gog was the king of Phrygia. Hear me out...

This all kind of hinges on the assumption that Gog is a human monarch and hegemon, vs, for example, an angelic principality, as is popularly claimed. I can't prove that obviously, but I would submit this: Gog is called "Nasi" which basically means "clan chief," whereas every single time Scripture deals with what we definitively know to be an angelic principality (e.g. the Prince of Persia), it always uses the alternative "Sar," which is basically the general Semitic term for what we might call a little g god or angel in modern parlance, essentially meaning ruler (but in a non dynastic sense).

So, right out the gate, we can probably safely make the assumption that we're dealing with a human hegemon (i.e. a literal dynastic chieftain with hegemonic control over the other chieftains of the region, vs trying to spiritualize it as an angelic ruler like the Prince of Persia). Which should make him easy to identify, since we know the general time and place. I.e. we're simply looking for a significant hegemonic dynasty circa 600 BC, that was familiar to the general audience during the first temple period.

We can pretty well rule out anything in Mesopotamia because Babylon, Assyria, and Persia are separate concepts in Ezekiel and his contemporaries like Daniel. Which pretty much leaves Asia Minor as the only possible region, just by process of elimination. The only alternative would be to start looking at far east Asian ancient history, but that was very obscure to people of that era, and we would have to do a lot of revisionism to place those peoples that far east. We have to go out on the assumption that Ezekiel's audience knew what on earth he was talking about, and not have to rewrite secular history to make it fit.

So, we can CLEARLY identify the region, which is Asia Minor. While there is a lot of debate as to the exact location of the various nations under Gog's hegemony at any given time (Meshech et al), it's without any doubt that those nations were mostly centered around Asia Minor in Ezekiel's day. Most scholars place Meshech and Tubal there, and many more place Magog and others there, as well. No matter how you cut it, Asia Minor is in the crosshairs dead center.

This makes great historical sense, too, because Asia Minor was basically the proto-Hellenistic culture, from which classical Greece borrowed its art, architecture and philosophy. It wasn't obscure to his readers, in other words, but was rather prominent in their sphere of awareness. That's why Asia Minor is so central to Biblical history, because it was geographically and culturally important as far back as anyone could remember, and retained that status basically up through the medieval period. It had the same significance in Bronze Age Mesopotamia as Europe does in post modern America. These weren't obscure places or peoples in Ezekiel's day. They were incredibly culturally, politically, and geographically prominent in the ancient world.

So to identify Gog, it's pretty simple. We're looking for the principle hegemon of the region of Asia Minor around the time of Ezekiel. Well, there's only one possibility, and that's Phrygia.

Just prior to Ezekiel's time, the entire region of Asia Minor was under the hegemonic control of the Phrygian Empire, ruled by a dynasty of kings with the hereditary title "Gordius." He fits the Ezekiel 38 paradigm really well, too, right down to the typology. Ezekiel says he's "Nasi" of the surrounding peoples, in contrast to a "Melech," which makes his role something along the lines of a "coalition leader" in modern terms. Which is precisely the kind of relationship that Phrygia had with the surrounding peoples, in the sense that they weren't formally an empire, but more of a de facto one. A loose confederation, if you will, of a diverse group of different ethnolinguistic peoples all inhabiting the same region, culturally connected by a prominent city state (which honestly just kind of describes the Greeks in general). So Phrygia was kind of like a proto-Greece, and the king of the city state of Gordion was kind of an informal emperor of an informal empire made up of autonomous members who were more culturally and economically tied than through formal subjugation. So the Gordian kings were essentially just the most prominent (and certainly wealthiest) of the clan chiefs of the region, which fits very well with the concept of a Nasi over a diverse region.

Again, these weren't obscure places or peoples. They were of such geopolitical prominence that they're mythologized to this day. The legendary King Midas of Greek myth was one such Gordian ruler of Phrygia, so this is an empire with emperors of such prominence that it survives into the modern consciousness of the average person (which is really saying a lot).

Another interesting element is that "Gordius" is a Greek transliteration of earlier transliterations. We don't know what the actual title was in the Phrygian language. Actually, the founding king of the Phrygian empire was of Greek origin, so we're about three languages removed from whatever his actual name was. We also don't know how many languages "Gog" was rendered from, as Gog doesn't appear to be a Hebrew word.

The Greek "ius" suffix is almost certainly not part of the original name, so Gordius's actual name was probably a one syllable name. Ds and Gs are very easy to get shifted in transliterations, and the Rs can get added or deleted depending on how the vowel is shifted. The R in the Greek rendering is essentially just shifting the O, so it's absolutely no stretch to speculate that the original name could have EASILY ended up being rendered as Gordius in Greek and Gog in Hebrew.

And this next part is REALLY interesting. Gordius was from Thracian origin, having emigrated to Asia Minor in like 800BC. Both Thracian and Phrygian languages were Indo-European, not Semitic.

In Indo-European languages, they would add suffixes to declinate words. So like in Germanic they'll add "as" to shift it into the genitive case. They didn't used to have prepositions because they didn't need them, because they declinated their nouns. Like you'll even see remnants of that to this day in very formal German (like Volke on the German parliament building to shift Volk into the genitive case, rendering "of the German people" without an actual preposition).

That's where we get this "ius" suffix in Greek is from this same Indo-European convention of adding suffixes to nouns to declinate them. In Indo European languages, they would add suffixes to nouns to shift case from nominative to, in this case, genitive. Basically it means "from" or "of" if you were to try and translate it.

And since the Greeks used consonants to modify vowels like we do in English, we can surmise that the original name probably didn't have the R, but rather some kind of vowel marker, if anything. You kind of make this involuntary R sound depending on how you render the vowel between consonants, which is why we have so many vowel + R combos in modern Indo-European languages. Vowels are also more of a range of a single concept than unique letters, so Os can become Us and that kind of thing. Actually they didn't even originally have vowels at all, they just had consonants right next to each other, then eventually accent marks, then vowels, then vowels with accent marks. So vowels are just transitions between consonants, and then we started modifying vowels with consonants next to them to try and indicate what exact sound the vowel made, kind of as a replacement for accent marks. Long story short, D vs G, a stray R, O vs U, etc. aren't obstacles to this hypothesis, and Gog and Gordius aren't nearly as different as they sound to a modern reader.

So basically to get from Gog to Gordius, you just have to assume that the G got swallowed, making a foreign listener confuse it for a D, then we add the ius suffix in Greek to denote that this person is "of Gog" or "from Gog." By the time you get to the Greeks, the Gordian kings were already figures of myth and legend, so vestiges of the Phrygian kings in Hellenistic Asia Minor may have been referred to that way. Perhaps even the original kings themselves referred to themselves that way, and perhaps the Semitic transliterations simply kept the un-declinated name of the original. Who knows. That's just one example how it could have happened, and remember we're talking two languages both three languages or more distant from the source, so it could have gone back and forth several times.

In Indo-European, "gud" is the general word for deity, kind of like the Semitic Baal. (actually where we get the modern English word "God"). It's similar to the Semitic term Baal in the sense that it's just this generic term for deity that means ruler or something along those lines. And of course the pagans thought their kings were descended from their sky gods, so the terms also get applied to mortal kings, as well, as dynastic titles, which is why you end up with so many iterations of them that seemingly conflict. In other words, both Gog and Gordius could simply be generic terms for rulership that trace back to a common noun, that then later became associated with a particular dynasty. I.e. Gog could be to Phrygian kings what "Horus" was to Egyptians, Caesar was to Romans, etc. in the sense that it's a generic term for a deity, ruler, dynasty, and even individual all in one.

So, in summary, we know for a fact that Rosh, Meshech, Tubal, and (probably) Magog were associated with Asia Minor in Ezekiel's time. Actually, probably about half of scholars place Magog dead center of the ancient Phrygian empire, with the ancient capital of Gordian smack dab in the middle of Magog. So "Gog of the land of Magog" makes absolutely perfect sense in that context.

https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQ2kXXMY3Pm817p7D4qQ4TOhodCZKXtovdMoA&s

We know for a fact that the Gordian kings were the hegemons of Asia Minor at that time. They controlled the immediate area around Magog entirely, and their influence basically made them hegemons over all of Asia Minor, or at least the majority of it, which included some of the other peoples, like Gomer (Western Anatolia at that time).

So yea, I would submit that Ezekiel's audience knew EXACTLY who he was talking about. I think his readers would have been as familiar with these terms as we are with like "the king of England" for example. He was residing in Neo-Babylon at its height, and Phrygia had about the same level of preeminence as like England or France in today's geopolitics, in the sense that its power had waned, but it was culturally and historically of absolutely mythic proportions in the minds of people at that time. So the way ancient peoples thought about Phrygia would be similar to how Americans think about Renaissance Europe.

This is only the beginning, things get a lot more interesting when you start tracing what happened to these peoples through the ages. This is only a snapshot of those nations and their dynastic houses at the time of the Ezekiel (or likely just prior to his time). This has already run super long so I'll stop here, but if there's interest I can make a second post detailing what happened and where these people groups seem to have ended up (which I know is the million dollar question).