In the first part of this series, we explored a simple but often overlooked reality: secular analysts tend to ignore Scripture, while many theologians ignore geopolitics. Yet the prophets themselves spoke about real nations, real territories, and real conflicts centered around a very specific place on earth, Israel.
One of the first steps in understanding biblical prophecy is learning how to properly read the text. A foundational principle of exegesis is that Scripture cannot mean today what it never meant to its original audience. Before we attempt to connect prophetic passages to modern events, we must first ask how the people who originally heard these words would have understood them.
When the ancient Israelites heard names like Moab, Ammon, or Edom, they didn’t hear abstract political labels. They immediately recognized the geography, the ancestry, and the history behind those names. These were not distant nations. They were the peoples living directly around them, neighbors with whom Israel had centuries of shared history.
Understanding that geography is critical when reading Book of Psalms 83.
Psalm 83 describes a coordinated effort by surrounding peoples to destroy Israel as a nation. The psalmist writes:
“They plot craftily against your people;
they consult together against your treasured ones.
They say, ‘Come, let us wipe them out as a nation;
let the name of Israel be remembered no more.’”
Notice how the conflict begins. The psalm does not describe armies marching across borders or massive empires invading from distant lands. Instead, it begins with something more subtle: a conspiracy.
“They plot.”
“They consult together.”
“They form a confederacy.”
The emphasis is on coordination.
The nations listed in the psalm form what might be described as the inner circle around Israel.
The text names several peoples:
Edom, Moab, Ammon, Philistia, Tyre, and Assyria.
To understand the significance of the passage, it helps to translate those ancient names into the regions we recognize today.
Edom occupied the territory south and southeast of Israel, roughly corresponding to parts of modern southern Jordan. The Edomites were descendants of Esau and controlled important trade routes east of the Dead Sea.
Moab was located directly east of the Dead Sea in what is now central Jordan. The Moabites had a complicated relationship with Israel throughout biblical history.
North of Moab lay the land of Ammon, whose capital city (Rabbah) is known today as Amman, the capital of Jordan.
Philistia occupied the southwestern coastal strip of Israel, closely corresponding with the modern Gaza region.
Tyre was a powerful Phoenician port city along the Mediterranean coast in what is now southern Lebanon.
Assyria was the great empire to Israel’s northeast, centered in areas that today include northern Iraq and parts of Syria.
When you place these names on a map, a striking pattern appears. Every group listed in Psalm 83 comes from the territories immediately surrounding Israel. None of the nations listed are distant superpowers. They are all part of the geographic ring closest to Israel’s borders.
This is why Psalm 83 is often understood as describing a regional coalition, not a global war.
Another fascinating detail is that many of these peoples were historically connected to Israel through family lines described earlier in the Bible. The Moabites and Ammonites, for example, trace their ancestry to Lot in the narrative recorded in the Book of Genesis 19. These genealogies mattered deeply in the ancient world. They shaped how people understood alliances, rivalries, and shared history.
The psalm ultimately describes a unified goal among the coalition:
“Let us wipe them out as a nation.”
In other words, the objective is not merely territorial gain but the elimination of Israel itself.
From a geopolitical perspective, the pattern is notable. Israel’s most immediate security challenges throughout history have typically come from the territories surrounding its borders. Larger empires have certainly influenced events, but the pressure often appears first through actors operating within this inner circle of neighboring regions.
In the modern Middle East, conflicts involving Israel rarely appear in the form of traditional nation-state wars. Instead, pressure often comes through militant organizations operating within the same geographic regions identified in Psalm 83. Groups such as Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad operating from Gaza, and the Houthi movement in Yemen have all participated in ongoing hostilities toward Israel. While these organizations are not the same entities described in the biblical text, they operate within many of the same geographic corridors surrounding Israel, illustrating how regional pressure can still emerge from the inner circle of territories around the Jewish state.
Psalm 83 captures that dynamic by focusing entirely on the peoples closest to Israel.
This is where the concentric-circle framework discussed in Part 1 becomes helpful. The prophetic narrative often begins with conflicts involving Israel’s immediate neighbors before expanding outward to include larger regional powers and, eventually, global alliances.
In other words, the story of the end times does not begin with a world war. It begins much closer to home.
In the next part of this series, we will examine another prophetic passage that may act as a bridge between regional conflict and larger international alliances: the prophecy concerning Damascus and its potential role in the unfolding events of the Middle East.
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Troy P Zehnder 