I was new to the Seminary when I first got seriously interested in the battle of Armageddon. I was living in an old dormitory at Andrews University (Old Burman Hall) that my father had also lived in at one time. All the seminarians were placed on the top floor, where things would occasionally get out of control. I remember one night when a couple of budding preachers got into an argument and ended up spraying each other with fire extinguishers in the hallway. So much for maturity arriving at the age of 21-24!
            Anyway, in that dorm situation I had the opportunity to rekindled an old friendship with a young man named Don. Don had been blind from birth, which led to many interesting situations back in college (Atlantic Union College), where he had lived across the bath from my roommate and I. Knowing that Don needed transportation from time to time, I decided to include him in whatever Sabbath activities I was involved in. One Sabbath he asked if we could attend worship services at a small African-American church about fifteen miles away. He had been asked to teach the lesson. I didn’t have anything else I had to do, so I agreed to drive him over. The highlight of the drive to church was a small hump in an otherwise flat road. Since Don couldn’t see, I sped up approaching the hump and gave him a roller coaster type surprise. It was the kind of thing that I often did just to let him know he was a regular guy and wasn’t going to be coddled because of a handicap.
            Don had barely gotten around to forgiving me when we arrived at the little church. After he led out in the Sabbath School lesson, we sat with the congregation of about 25, waiting for a guest speaker to arrive, hoping one of us wouldn’t get drafted at the last minute. Just in time he walked in, a large African-American pastor who quickly let us know that, in spite of the small crowd, he had come to “preach!” And preach he did!
            The sermon was on the Battle of Armageddon. He moved from text to text with confidence, ranging from Revelation to Ezekiel to Jeremiah to Joel. The story he told about the end-time battle was fascinating, I had never heard anything quite like it before (and never heard anything quite like it thereafter at the Seminary, at least). Working particularly from some Hebrew words in Ezekiel, he painted a scenario in which the people of God would gather in the Middle East at the end of time. They would be at peace with God and man, and all would seem to be well. But suddenly from the far north would come a massive attack. In the Hebrew of Ezekiel he found references to Russia (Hebrew rosh, translated “chief prince” in Eze 38:2), Moscow (Hebrew Meshech)and Tobolsk (Hebrew Tubal), explaining that the army that would attack the Middle East was the army of the Soviet Union, joined by the Iranians and other countries in the Middle East area (verse 5).
            The attack would center in the land of Israel, as we know it today. The attacking army was of such large numbers they appeared like clouds covering the land. In the middle of this attack God would intervene with a large earthquake, which so frightened the army that they began to fight each other. God then caused what was left of the Soviet army to be devastated with nuclear missiles (see Ezek 38:22), presumably with the assistance of the United States. This attack destroyed 85 per cent of the attackers. The destruction was so great it took seven months to bury the Soviet dead.
            Needless to say, this scenario blew my young pastoral mind. I was really excited to get into the text for myself and see if these things were so. In the car on the way home I shared my excitement with Don. Don was a year ahead of me at the Seminary, and he immediately scoffed that the sermon was, “A bunch of baloney.” He accused the preacher of being completely oblivious to sound principles of interpretation. Somewhat deflated, I nevertheless determined to study for myself and think for myself. When one preacher says the opposite of another, the only sensible response is to go back to the Word of God for yourself. But there was a plus side to that Sabbath morning experience. That sermon launched me into a lifelong study of the battle of Armageddon. If it were not for that sermon, the book you hold in your hand might never have been written. So God can use any circumstance He wishes to bring us to the place where He wants us to be.
            Getting back my dorm room that afternoon I grabbed the fourth volume of my SDA Bible Commentary and looked up Ezekiel 38. Sure enough, the scenario outlined in the sermon could be found there, although it was listed as one of several options, and a fairly unlikely option at that. I pulled out the text of Ezekiel 38, looking for references to the Battle of Armageddon. To my great surprise, the word Armageddon was not found anywhere in Ezekiel 38, in fact I could not find it anywhere in the Book of Ezekiel at all. I was shocked! A sermon on the battle of Armageddon was largely based on Ezekiel 38, yet Ezekiel 38 had nothing to say about the battle of Armageddon! How did the preacher know that Ezekiel 38 had anything to do with Armageddon? What if Ezekiel 38 was a reference to a local battle in near future and not at the end of time (the actual context of Ezek 38 is described in pages ??-?? of my book What the Bible Says About the End Time)?
            I decided it was time to get serious about this research. I pulled out a complete concordance, determined to find every reference to Armageddon no matter where they were located in the Bible. If I couldn’t trust a preacher’s word, I wanted to be sure I didn’t leave out any text that might be helpful in understanding the end-time battle. I couldn’t believe my eyes. No matter what concordance I used there was a total of only one mention of Armageddon anywhere in the Bible. And that was found in Revelation 16:16. Here is my translation of that text: “And he gathered them together at the place which is called in the Hebrew language, Harmagedon.” There is no other reference to the word Armageddon (or Harmagedon) anywhere in the Bible. Whatever we can know about the Battle of Armageddon will be known from the context of this verse in the Book of Revelation.
            As you may remember, if you have read my previous book, The Deep Things of God, the larger context of Revelation includes the other 65 books of the Bible. The visions of Revelation often build on the words and ideas of the Old Testament, either by alluding to it directly or echoing its language. In addition, Revelation is firmly related to the New Testament, where the gospel of Jesus Christ provides the foundation for its end-time message. We will explore this larger context in the following chapters of this book, but in this chapter we want to focus on the meaning of the word “Armageddon” itself.
            Where did the “H” in Harmagedon come from? I soon learned in Greek class (I was taking Intermediate Greek that quarter) that the answer was in a small mark on top of the “a” in Armageddon. That mark is called a “breathing mark,” it signals the kind of breath you breathe out as you pronounce the “a.” If the mark goes one way, the “a” is pronounced normally. But if the mark goes the other way, the “a” is preceded by a hard breathing, which is another way of saying the “a” is preceded by an “h” sound. In many ancient manuscripts the breathing marks don’t appear and even when they do, it is sometimes easy to miss them. So the translators of the King James Bible just wrote out the letters and ignored the breathing mark at the beginning of the word. Hence “Armageddon” has become a recognized word in the English language.

           I found that the two “ds” in Armageddon are harder to explain, but they have remained in modern translations, even though there is only one “d” in the Greek, because people are familiar with the spelling.
            After discovering that Rev 16:16 is the only place in the Bible where the word Harmagedon appears, I studied the immediate context in Rev 16:12-16. The name Harmagedon is the location of the final battle of earth’s history (v. 16). In that battle three demonic frogs (whoever they are) gather the kings of the whole earth to the great battle of God Almighty (v. 13-14). There is no question that this is the closing battle of this earth’s history. According to the text, there are several other players in that battle: the great River Euphrates and the Kings from the Rising of the Sun are mentioned in verse 12, the dragon, the beast and the false prophet are mentioned in verse 13. And verse 15 makes it clear that the people of God are somehow involved as well. A blessing is pronounced on everyone who stays awake and hangs onto his or her clothes.
            So it became clear to me that the Battle of Armageddon was truly the final battle of earth’s history. But I still had no clue what the word meant.
            The text of Rev 16:16 is perfectly clear on one thing. The word Harmagedon is in some way Hebrew in origin. So I decided to search and see if the word “Harmagedon” or something like it could be found in the Hebrew Old Testament, but it wasn’t there. No wonder students of the Bible have been frustrated over this text for centuries! The word behind “Armageddon” occurs only one time, in Rev 16:16.
            At this point I remembered that many words in the Greek and Hebrew Bibles are compounds, in other words, they are combinations of two or more smaller words. After examining the various possibilities, I made my first breakthrough. In the Hebrew, the word “har” means “mountain.” Harmagedon makes some sort of reference to a mountain. In fact, one could translate the word “Mountain of Magedon.” Finally, I was getting somewhere! If I could only find a mountain named Magedon, I might be able to pinpoint the location of the final battle of earth’s history! So I began looking through atlases of the ancient world for a mountain named Magedon, but I didn’t find one. A quick look at a Hebrew concordance also indicated that “magedon” was not a word in the Hebrew vocabulary. So I was stumped once more.
            One day in class a teacher was discussing the ancient world into which Jesus was born and in which the early church grew and developed. As he was discussing various developments in the time of Jesus he repeatedly talked about “the Septuagint.” I had never heard this word before, so after several repetitions I raised my hand and asked, “What is the Septuagint?”
            “Oh, I’m sorry,” the teacher said, “I thought everyone was familiar with that.”
            I know he didn’t mean it that way, but the comment sure made me feel dumb.
            “In the centuries before Jesus was born,” he went on, “more and more Jews began moving to other parts of the Mediterranean world. Many settled in Egypt and Asia Minor, others settled in Syria and Greece. Some even went as far as Rome and Spain. In most of these areas Greek had become a common unifying language, so the children of these Jews learned the Greek language growing up and over time they gradually lost their ability to understand Hebrew. That meant that if they were to be able to study what we call the Old Testament, they would need to have a translation of the Hebrew Old Testament into the Greek language.
            Another student interrupted. “But what did they do for these people in the synagogue before such a translation was made?”
            “They continued to recite the Hebrew Bible from the front,” the professor replied, “just as Jews still do today. But they followed the reading with a “targum” (they called it), namely an oral translation of the Hebrew into the local language of the people. We know that the oral Aramaic targums (translations) eventually were written down, and the oral Greek targums no doubt formed the basis of the written translation that came together over a couple hundred years in Alexandria.
            “According to Jewish tradition, seventy Hebrew and Greek scholars got together in Alexandria and each of them made his own translation of the five books of Moses in separate rooms. When they got together and compared these seventy translations with each other, they discovered that all seventy translations were word for word identical! According to the story, this was how the Septuagint came into being, the Greek translation of the Torah.
            “But what does the word Septuagint mean?” another student asked.
            “Oh, sorry,” said the teacher. “I probably should have explained that right off. The word “Septuagint” comes from the Greek word for “seventy.” It reflects the story of how the Torah came into being. Obviously, scholars today don’t think it happened exactly the way the traditions describe, but somehow the Septuagint translation got put together in the centuries just before Jesus came to earth. What is important to Christians is that the Septuagint became the first Bible of the Christian church. It helps us understand how early Christians understood the Old Testament.”
            I jumped into the discussion again. “Does that help to explain why New Testament quotations of the Old Testament often read quite differently from our translations of the Old Testament?” I was hoping this wasn’t another dumb question.
            “Right!” said the teacher. “New Testament writers often quote the Septuagint rather than translating directly from a Hebrew text like the one that has been preserved for us. It is clear that there are significant variants between the Septuagint and the Hebrew text that has been passed down to us. Scholars have long debated whether the Septuagint or our Hebrew text is more original. But the differences can be seen in the quotations of the Old within the New Testament itself.”
            Wow, was that class ever an eye-opener! I went up to the teacher afterward and asked where I could find a Septuagint and whether or not there was any concordance I could use to look up words in it. He told me how to find these tools in the library. I couldn’t wait for some free time to see if the Septuagint would be any help in my quest to understand the meaning of Har-magedon.
            A couple of days later I had a free hour and went to the Seminary Reference Library. I pulled down a printed copy of the Septuagint and then found the concordance to the Septuagint. I found myself holding my breath as I opened the concordance looking for “harmagedon.” I got to the “h” part and then paged over to “har,” but was disappointed. The word harmagedon wasn’t in the Septuagint either. I slumped back in my chair for a moment. No wonder everybody but that preacher thinks this is a complicated topic, I thought. But then I perked up again, I remembered that harmagedon was a compound word!

            So I paged over to the “m” section looking for magedon. Bingo! There were three references! At last I was getting somewhere! The references were Joshua 12:21; Judges 1:27; and Second Chronicles 35:22. I let out a quick yelp, and then flushed with embarrassment as several sets of eyes glared at me out of the tomb-like silence of the reference room. Mouthing a quick apology, I grabbed my Bible and began looking up the three passages. I started with Josh 12:21. I found it was part of a list of all the kings of city-states that Joshua killed in the various battles fought in the western part of Canaan, after crossing the Jordan River:
                        “The king of Taanach, one; the king of Megiddo, one.”  Josh 12:21 (ESV)
            A quick glance at the Greek of the Septuagint showed me that magedon was a translation of Megiddo! Megiddo was an ancient Canaanite city at the edge of the Valley of Jezreel, it was part of the inheritance given to the tribe of Manasseh after the conquest. The Valley of Jezreel lay between the area of Samaria and Galilee. So it was a pretty strategic location. It was also clear that the reference here was to the City of Megiddo and not something else, since the list included the kings of a whole series of cities in western Canaan: Jerusalem, Hazor, Lachish, Arad, Libnah, Hebron, Gezer and Jericho. So magedon here was not a reference to a mountain, but to a city! It was not a list of cities conquered, but a list of cities whose king was killed in battle. Not sure what to do with this information, I went on to the next text in my list:
            “But Manasseh did not drive out the people of Beth Shan or Taanach or Dor or Ibleam or Megiddo and their surrounding settlements, for the Canaanites were determined to live in that land.”  Jdg 1:27 (NIV)
            Once again this is a list of cities. These are the cities in the territory of Manasseh which the members of the tribe did not conquer. Evidently, the kings of those cities were killed, but the cities themselves were not occupied. Once again magedon is the Greek word used to translate Megiddo, the name of one of the cities. So for my purposes, this text yielded the same basic information as the previous one.
            The third text I looked up was 2 Chr 35:22 (NIV):
            “Josiah, however, would not turn away from him, but disguised himself to engage him in battle. He would not listen to what Neco had said at God’s command but went to fight him on the plain of Megiddo.”
            This text sounded real interesting, so I looked up this battle in a Bible history book. I found out that Pharaoh Necho (Neco) II of Egypt wanted to take advantage of the decline of the Assyrian Empire around 609 BC. So he took his army up the coast alongside Judah and planned to pass through King Josiah’s territory to attack the Assyrians at Carchemish in what is modern-day Iraq. Josiah intervened with his army and was killed near the city of Megiddo in a futile attempt to stop Necho. What I found interesting in 2 Chr 35:22 was the phrase “plain of Megiddo.” For the writer of this verse, the name Megiddo could be applied to the whole valley as well as the city. So I learned that the name of the city could be applied to the geographical area around the city. Not knowing whether or not that was an important insight, I filed it away in the back of my mind.
            One thing I noticed in all of these texts. Magedon, with one “d,” consistently translated Megiddo, withtwo “d”s. In the Hebrew a double letter is usually signified by a little dot, but the dot is not always there in the text, the native speaker can just sense it based on how the particular letter is related to the other letters in the word. Perhaps the translators of the Septuagint worked from Hebrew texts that didn’t have the dot. That might explain why translators of the English Bible translate Harmagedon with two “d”s: Armageddon. The original translators must have understood harmagedon to mean “Mountain of Megiddo,” and Megiddo has two “d”s.
            Then I discovered something even more interesting. When my eyes went back to the Septuagint concordance I noticed just above magedon a reference to mageddon. Evidently, in 2 Kings 9:27 the Septuagint translates Megiddo with a double “d,” as mageddon! So the English term Armageddon definitely seemed to be based on the concept of Mountain of Megiddo. I wasn’t sure where the “n” in mageddon came from, but the word clearly seemed based on the Hebrew word Megiddo. The English translation goes as follows (2 Kgs 9:27 NIV):
            When Ahaziah king of Judah saw what had happened, he fled up the road to Beth Haggan. Jehu chased him, shouting, “Kill him too!” They wounded him in his chariot on the way up to Gur near Ibleam, but he escaped to Megiddo and died there.
            So in three of the four cases of magedon/mageddon in the Greek Old Testament there is a clear reference to the city. In the fourth case, the name’s reference is expanded to the whole plain in which the city of Megiddo was located. As I looked up Megiddo in a number of Bible dictionaries I found that the region of Megiddo was an ancient battleground even more often than the incidents I had found in the concordance to the Septuagint. It was near Megiddo that the armies of Israel under Deborah and Barak defeated Sisera and his Canaanite army (Judg 5:19). As I had already noticed, Megiddo was the scene of the fatal struggle between Josiah and Pharaoh Neco (2 Kgs 23:29,30; 2 Chr 35:22). And this latter battle was such a memorable event in Israel’s history that the mourning for Josiah was recalled a hundred years later in Zech 12:11. Thus, if John was alluding to this ancient battleground, Megiddo’s significance for ancient Israel made it an appropriate background to his description of the final battle between the forces of good and evil.
            When I combined the conclusions of my study it seemed clear that the most natural understanding of harmagedon in Rev 16:16 is “mountain of Megiddo,” a compound word derived from the Greek transliteration of the Hebrew word har, which means “mountain,” with the Greek transliteration of the Hebrew for Megiddo. But I was still troubled about one thing. While the Bible can talk about the Valley of Megiddo and the City of Megiddo, nowhere in the Bible is there any mention of a Mountain of Megiddo. And no matter which atlas you use you won’t find a Mountain of Megiddo anywhere on this earth! So I seemed to have found the meaning of Armageddon and yet the results of my research didn’t really settle anything for me. I still had no idea what “Mountain of Megiddo” had to do with the sixth plague of Revelation 16.
            I decided it was time to get some more expert help. I heard that one of the teachers in the Seminary had published an article on Armageddon, so I decided to visit him and find out what Mountain of Megiddo was all about. I made an appointment for the following week and was on “pins and needles” to see what I was going to learn from this interview.
            “So, I hear you’re really interested in the word Armageddon!” the teacher said. “I published an article on that in a scholarly journal just a couple of years ago. So what do you think it means?”

            “Well, I’m not really sure, yet,” I replied, “But I’ve been looking at parallels in the Septuagint and it looks like the word Armageddon means ‘Mountain of Megiddo.’”
            “You think so?” the teacher said skeptically, “I’ve found a lot of problems with that idea.”
            “Really?” I said, trying to sound respectful. “But what else could it possibly mean?”
            “Well, first you have to determine whether what looks like the obvious reading is really correct,” he replied. If that cannot be correct, then you have to look at whatever other possibilities there may be.”
            “OK, so I guess I need to know why you don’t think Mountain of Megiddo is the correct meaning of Armageddon.”
            “Here’s what I’ve found,” the teacher said, pulling a copy of his article out of one of the drawers in his desk. He handed the copy over to me, with red markings on the places where the argument against Mountain of Megiddo was given. “For one thing, while the Old Testament knows of a city of Megiddo (Josh 17:11; Judg 1:27; 1 Kgs 4:12; 9:15; 2 Kgs 9:27; 23:29,30), a king of Megiddo (Josh 12:21 RSV), a valley of Megiddo (2 Chr 35:22; Zech 12:11), and waters of Megiddo (Judg 5:19), it knows of no Mountain of Megiddo.” Over the next half hour we looked at all the texts listed in the article together. He did seem to have a point. Nowhere in the Old Testament is there any Mountain of Megiddo.
            “But I already knew that,” I protested cautiously, having already been “burned” more than once by the stating of a hasty opinion in the matter. “Can’t John take a number of different Old Testament pieces and put them together in a new way? After all, the word Armageddon begins with “Har” which means mountain.”
            “True,” said the teacher patiently. “But that is not all. Not only is Mountain of Megiddo not found anywhere in the Old Testament, it is not found anywhere in all of the ancient world before the reference in Revelation. Not only that, the fathers of the church over the two or three centuries after Revelation was written didn’t interpret it as Mountain of Megiddo either. So if John understood Armageddon as Mountain of Megiddo, he was taking it to mean something no one before or after him understood. That seems pretty unlikely to me.”
            He went on. “Many scholars in the past have explored this issue and nearly all of them disagreed with the Mountain of Megiddo interpretation. If you look at ancient writings outside the Jewish world they often speak of a mythical world mountain at the end of the world. But that mythical mountain is never called Megiddo. But there is something even more decisive in my mind.”
            “What is that?” I asked, not sure I wanted to know.
            “If you go to the Old Testament passages related to the end of the world, the final battle of earth’s history is never described as happening at Megiddo, the final battle is always around Jerusalem. In Zechariah 12 there is a future battle in which all the nations gather against Jerusalem, but God delivers the city by making it like an immovable rock (Zech 12:1-9). In Zechariah 14 all the nations gather against Jerusalem and conquer it, with half the people going into exile. But at that point God intervenes with a plague on Jerusalem’s enemies and restores the city (Zech 14:1-15). In Joel 3:12-16 all the nations advance into the Valley of Jehoshaphat, just outside Jerusalem. Once again God intervenes to destroy these armies. In Daniel 11 the King of the North pitches his tents near the “glorious holy mountain,” a reference to the site of the temple. Then Michael stands up to defend his people (Dan 11:40-45; 12:1). You will even find echos of the final battle around Jerusalem in Revelation 14 itself, just two chapters before Armageddon (Rev 14:19-20). So nowhere in the Bible is there any evidence that the end-time battle will occur in relation to Megiddo, much less to a Mountain of Megiddo.”
            Just then the bell rang out in the hall. The teacher looked at his watch and an expression of horror came over his face. “It’s already 11:30,” he exclaimed, “I’m late for class! I have to go.”
            “I’m so sorry,” I responded. “I’m sorry to take so much of your time.” I hastily backed out of the teacher’s office, overwhelmed with the force of his arguments against what I had found in my own Bible study.
            A few days later I checked back with the teacher’s secretary to see if I could make another appointment to learn what the teacher actually thought Armageddon meant.
            “Oh, that won’t be possible,” she said in a voice that allowed for no protest.
            “Why not?” I protested anyway.
            “He is teaching an extension class in Africa and he won’t be back in the office for at least a month.”
            Well, so much for that, I thought. I guess I’m on my own. Where to go from here? I checked with another teacher who hadn’t done a study of Armageddon, but might be able to help me with my search. He suggested I check the reference to Armageddon in a number of Bible dictionaries and Encyclopedias. He thought that if I looked at enough of them I would probably have a pretty good idea of the various ideas on Armageddon that people held.
            That sounded like a good idea, since the other teacher wouldn’t be back for a month. I was free for the afternoon on Sunday, so I decided to spend the afternoon in Seminary Reference, looking at the dozen or so Bible Dictionaries available there. I was looking forward to my wedding in a couple of months, but at the time I was single and my wife-to-be was almost a thousand miles away, so I didn’t have a lot things going on that would distract me from my study interests (everyone knew better than to have me responsible for any of the wedding arrangments!).
            I went to the library after lunch on Sunday and gathered all the Bible Dictionaries and Encyclopedias I could find. There were even one or two in German, which I could work through with the help of a German-English dictionary. As I looked through these dictionaries, I found out there were seven major views on the meaning of Armageddon over 1900 years of interpretation. While my journey through these dictionaries would probably not be of interest to you, I think it would be helpful for me to summarize these seven views for you here.
            (1) The first attempt to explain the meaning of the word Armageddon seems to have been made by Early Church Fathers such as Hippolytus and Jerome. Like me, they thought that Armageddon was located somewhere in Palestine, offering suggestions such as the Valley of Jehoshaphat (cf. Joel 3:2,12) or Mount Tabor (cf. Judg 4:6,12), at the eastern end of the Valley of Jezreel. But not many people followed them in these views, at least not right away.
            (2) The first proposal to gain wide currency among authors was advanced by the earliest people to write commentaries on the book of Revelation, Oecumenius early in the 6th Century and Andreas of Ceasarea around 600 AD. These commentators appear to have taken their cue from the Septuagint translators of Zech 12:11. In the Hebrew Zech 12:11 reads, “” The translators of the Septuagint seem to have thought that the word Megiddo was derived from the Hebrew root gadad which means “to cut,” “to gash,” or “to slaughter.” Therefore, Oecumenius and Andreas argued that the kings of the earth are gathered in Rev 16 to the “Mountain of Slaughter” to be exterminated.

            “Did you say Mount Carmel?” I exploded, almost spraying food in Bill’s face.
            “Whoa!” he shrieked, “Get a muzzle on that food cannon! You almost knocked me out with that one.”
            I laughed a bit but refused to be deterred. “Did you say Megiddo is near Mount Carmel?”
            “Of course,” Bill said. “Mount Carmel is actually a long ridge that marks the southern edge of the Valley of Jezreel. It starts right on the coast in Haifa and runs sort of southeast for a dozen miles toward the Jordan Valley. The best way to cross it is a pass that feeds right into Megiddo at the base of the mountain. In fact, we visited the site where they think Elijah defeated the prophets of Baal. It is the highest point on the ridge, just overlooking Megiddo.”
            I was in shock. I don’t remember anything else Bill said or anything that happened that evening. All I remember is that I was captured by the idea that Elijah defeated the prophets of Baal by calling fire down to earth from heaven. The fire demonstrated that the God of Israel was the true God. The fact that the prophets of Baal could not bring down fire proved that they were not worshiping the true God. It reminded me of one of the key elements of the final events in the Book of Revelation:

            (The land beast) performs great signs, even making fire come down from heaven to earth in front of people, and by the signs that it is allowed to work in the presence of the beast it deceives those who dwell on earth, telling them to make an image for the beast that was wounded by the sword and yet lived.  Rev 13:13-14 (ESV)

            Could it be that “Mountain of Megiddo” was a cryptic way of recalling the Old Testament story of Elijah’s showdown with the prophets of Baal? On Mount Carmel there was an encounter between Yahweh and Baal, between Elijah and Baal’s prophets. There were competing claims as to who was the true God, and the showdown on the mountain settled the issue by fire. This sounded an awful lot like the scenario in Revelation, chapters 13 through 17! What if Armageddon was a symbol of Mount Carmel and the decisive events that happened there? At that moment, the solution to the whole problem seemed to open itself up to me.
            The various word studies had taken us as far as they were likely to go. All of the solutions to the problem were possible, but only the Mountain of Megiddo interpretation was based on a straightforward reading of the Greek text of both Revelation and the Old Testament. Still, by itself that was not good enough. The key would be to examine the larger context of the Battle of Armageddon in Revelation 13-17. Whatever reading fit best with that overall context should be the correct one.
            But I was still curious about the har moed interpretation. The Hebrew move from magedon to mo ed still seemed a huge leap to me. But I didn’t have a lot of confidence in my understanding of Hebrew. So I decided to check in on my Hebrew teacher to see what he thought. The next day I went by his office and saw the door open. Tentatively I stuck my head in and asked, “Do you have a couple of minutes? I have a Hebrew question.”
            Few students must ever ask professors technical questions about Hebrew. He was almost too eager as he waved me in to the empty chair in front of his desk. I looked around the room. It had an ancient look about it with lots of mementos from archaeological digs and Middle Eastern craft shops. There was even a facsimile of a page in handwritten Hebrew. I assumed that the page must have been from somewhere in the Old Testament. My observations were interrupted by the gentle question, “What were you wanting to ask me about?”
            “Well, I’m studying the meaning of the word Armageddon in Rev 16:16. The text says that it is based on a Hebrew word, but no such word occurs in the Old Testament. I’ve drawn the conclusion that har-magedon probably means Mountain of Megiddo, but many scholars think it should actually be har moed or Mountain of Assembly.” The teacher was listening patiently. “The question I have is how do you get har-mô êd out of har magedon in Hebrew? Is that kind of shift really legitimate? I know all about gimels and ayins but is such a shift of pronunciation really likely?”
            “Actually,” he replied, “I’ve done a little study on the meaning of Armageddon myself. And I share some of your concerns about the har-mô êd interpretation. The major difficulty with the har-mô êd interpretation is the great linguistic distance between mô êd and magedôn.”
            “And what exactly do you mean by linguistic distance?”
            “It is true that gamma is the only Greek letter that could correspond to the Hebrew ayin, so on the face of it the “g” in magedôn could concievably be used as the Greek equivalent of mô êd. However, there is no actual evidence anywhere in ancient literature that mô êd was ever transliterated as magedôn or even as moged. The shift that has been suggested is pure speculation. On the other hand, Septuagint evidence exists for the Mountain of Megiddo and the Mountain of Slaughter interpretations (based on the Septuagint reading of Zech 12:11). The theory was first raised by a scholar who also believed that the entire Book of Revelation was originally written in Hebrew.”
            “Was his name Torrey?” I asked.
            “That’s right, I had forgotten his name, you have a good memory,” the teacher smiled.
            “Actually, I just looked it up yesterday in a Bible dictionary,” I said in a weak attempt at humility, even although his comment felt very good.
            “It would be helpful to have even one clear example of magedôn as the translation of mo ed. But since there are none, the viewpoint is purely speculative, even though it is very appealing theologically.”
            “What do you think Armageddon means?” I asked, putting the teacher on the spot.
            “Actually, I think it is a reference to Mount Carmel,” he replied.
            “No way,” I exclaimed, “I just came to that same conclusion yesterday!”
            “Great minds think alike!” he grinned. “You see, the name Megiddo is not limited to the city of that name. It is often used to speak of something else in the geographical area. For example, the phrase “waters of Megiddo” is a reference to the Kishon River in Judges 5:19. And while Megiddo is not the name of a mountain, it isn’t really a valley either, the ruins of the ancient city are located on an elevation overlooking the Plain of Jezreel or Esdraelon. Since the city was located at the foot of the Carmel range, “mountain of Megiddo” could easily be a reference to Mount Carmel (1 Kgs 18:19,20; 2 Kgs 2:25; 4:25).