What does ‘Armageddon’ mean?

One verse

The word comes from a single verse in Revelation. The sixth of seven bowls of wrath is poured on the Euphrates, Rome’s eastern frontier, and the river dries up to open the way for “the kings that come from the sunrise.” Three unclean spirits like frogs go out to the kings of the whole earth, to gather them “for the war of that great day of God the Almighty” (Revelation 16:12–14). Then:

He gathered them together into the place which is called in Hebrew, “Harmagedon”.

And the vision moves on to the seventh bowl. No battle is fought at Harmagedon in the text. A final defeat of “the beast, the kings of the earth, and their armies” comes three chapters later, with no place named (Revelation 19:19–21), and Gog and Magog gather once more in Revelation 20:8. Later readers folded all three scenes into one “battle of Armageddon.”

The name

Har is Hebrew for mountain or hill; Megiddo is a city. Greek wrote its h-sound with a small mark rather than a letter, and Latin dropped it, which gave English Armageddon. It holds a puzzle. Megiddo is a mound beside a plain, and the Hebrew Bible speaks of “the valley of Megiddo” (2 Chronicles 35:22) and “the waters of Megiddo” (Judges 5:19), never of a mountain. Some scholars think John meant the high mound of the city itself, others nearby Mount Carmel, where Elijah faced the prophets of Baal. A few hear a pun on har mo‘ed, “the mountain of assembly” of Isaiah 14:13, fitting for a gathering. Most settle on Megiddo.

A real place

Tel Megiddo stands in northern Israel, about 30 kilometers (19 miles) southeast of Haifa, where the Wadi Ara pass cuts through the Carmel ridge and opens onto the Jezreel Valley. The coastal road between Egypt and Mesopotamia ran through that gap, so whoever held Megiddo held the road. Archaeologists have counted about twenty cities built one on top of another. Solomon is said to have fortified it (1 Kings 9:15), and today it is a national park and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In 2005 a salvage dig at the prison beside it uncovered the mosaic floor of a third-century Christian prayer hall, with an inscription offering a table “to God Jesus Christ.”

Why John chose it

To John’s readers, Megiddo already meant a famous fight, the way Waterloo does now.

• About 1457 BC: Thutmose III of Egypt defeats a Canaanite coalition there, the first battle recorded in detail.
• The judges: Deborah’s song remembers how “the kings of Canaan fought at Taanach by the waters of Megiddo” (Judges 5:19).
• 609 BC: Judah’s best-loved king falls there.
• 1918: the British general Edmund Allenby breaks the Ottoman line nearby and becomes Viscount Allenby of Megiddo.

In his days Pharaoh Necoh king of Egypt went up against the king of Assyria to the river Euphrates; and King Josiah went against him, but Pharaoh Necoh killed him at Megiddo when he saw him.

Zechariah made the mourning for Josiah a byword, “the mourning of Hadadrimmon in the valley of Megiddo” (Zechariah 12:11), and John knew that chapter: its line before, “They will look to me whom they have pierced” (Zechariah 12:10), is echoed in Revelation’s first chapter (Revelation 1:7).

Armageddon today

In English the word now means any catastrophe on a world scale, as in “nuclear Armageddon.” Theodore Roosevelt told his new Progressive Party in 1912, “We stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord.” Readers of Revelation still differ. Many evangelical Protestants expect a literal last battle in the Jezreel Valley. Jehovah’s Witnesses teach that Armageddon is God’s war ending human governments. Many other Christians and most scholars read it as a picture of evil’s final defeat, written to churches living under Rome. The next chapter of Revelation brings on Babylon the Great.