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290 Now again, in the twenty-first century A.D., a nuclear threat hangs over the very same historical place. It is enough reason to ask: Will history repeat itself—does history repeat itself, in some mysterious way, every twenty-one centuries? A war, an annihilating conflagration, has been depicted as part of the End of Days scenario in Ezekiel (chapters 38-39). Though “Gog of the land of Magog,” or “Gog and Magog,” are foreseen as the principal instigators in that final war, the list of combatants that shall be sucked into the battles en- compassed virtually every nation of note; and the focus of the conflagration shall be “the dwellers of the Navel of the Earth’”—the people of Jerusalem according to the Bible, but the people of “Babylon” as a replacement for Nippur to those for whom the clock stopped there. It is a spine-chilling realization that Ezekiel’s list of those widespread nations (38: 5) that will engage in the fi- nal war—Armageddon—actually begins with PERSIA— the very country (today’s Iran) whose leaders seek nuclear weapons with which to “wipe off the face of the Earth” the people who dwell where Har-Megiddo is! Who is that “Gog of the land of Magog,” and why does that prophecy from two and a half millennia ago sound so much like current headlines? Does the accuracy of such de- tails in the Prophecy point to the When—to our time, to our century? Armageddon, a Final War of Gog and Magog, is also an essential element of the End of Days scenario of the New Testament’s prophetic book, Revelation (whose full name is The Apocalypse of St. John the Divine). It compares the instigators of the apocryphal events to two beasts, one of which can “make fire come down from heaven to earth, in sight of men.” Only an enigmatic clue is given for its iden- tity (13: 18): Here is wisdom: Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: It is the number of a man; THE END OF DAYS