Valley of Hamon-gog
Valley of Hamon-gog is a location mentioned in the Old Testament, located in the region of Transjordan in modern-day Israel. Known today as Abarim. It appears across 2 verses in Scripture.
Biblical History
The Valley of Hamon-gog is a place-name that exists only within the visionary framework of Ezekiel's apocalyptic prophecy against Gog of the land of Magog (Ezekiel 38-39). In this extended oracle, Gog leads a vast coalition of nations in an assault against Israel's mountains in the latter days, only to be destroyed by a catastrophic divine intervention involving earthquake, pestilence, fire, and hailstones. In the aftermath of this cosmic battle, the bodies of Gog's fallen multitudes are so numerous that God instructs the people of Israel to designate a valley east of the Dead Sea as a burial ground. The valley is then named Hamon-gog, meaning "the multitude of Gog," as a perpetual testimony to the scale of the defeat (Ezekiel 39:11-16). For seven months, the Israelites are to bury the dead, and professional burial parties are then to search out and mark remaining bones. The name itself, memorialized in the landscape, functions as a theological monument: the earth itself will bear witness to the LORD's supremacy over all the nations that have gathered against His people. This eschatological geography is symbolic rather than strictly cartographic, though Ezekiel roots it in real terrain east of the Sea.
Archaeological & Historical Notes
The Valley of Hamon-gog has no certain archaeological identification, as it belongs to the prophetic-eschatological genre of Ezekiel 38-39 rather than to a historically attested location. The text places it east of the Dead Sea ("the sea"), in what would correspond to the Transjordanian highlands or the region of the Abarim mountains in modern Jordan. These mountains and the rugged terrain east of the Jordan Rift Valley are geologically and topographically consistent with Ezekiel's description of a broad burial valley. Scholars generally treat the location as part of Ezekiel's symbolic geography, which reshapes real landscape features into theological declarations about the ultimate fate of Israel's enemies.
Verse Appearances (2)
References
- Orr, J. (ed.) (1915) The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia. Chicago: Howard-Severance Company. [Public Domain]
- OpenBible.info (n.d.) Bible Geocoding. Available at: https://www.openbible.info/geo/. [CC BY 4.0]
- Bagnall, R. et al. (eds.) (n.d.) Pleiades: A Gazetteer of Past Places. Available at: https://pleiades.stoa.org. [CC BY 3.0]
- Wikidata contributors (n.d.) Wikidata. Available at: https://www.wikidata.org. [CC0]
- Lawrence, D. et al. (2025) Villages to Empires: a settlement dataset for the Southern Levant. doi:10.5281/zenodo.15111732. [CC BY 4.0]
- Church of England (1769) The Holy Bible, Authorized (King James) Version. [Public Domain]