Jews pray three times a day for protection from an end-of-days destroyer most of them cannot name. A New York rabbi says Armilus may already be operating through Iran or forces centered on Rome, as Christianity and Islam carry their own versions of the same figure.
Three times a day, Jews standing in prayer ask God to rebuild Jerusalem and restore the throne of David. Printed beside that blessing in many prayer books, in small parentheses that most worshippers skip, is an instruction to pray that Mashiach ben Yosef, the Messiah descended from Joseph, will not be killed by Armilus. Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff says almost no one notices it.
“This is a character if you ask most Jewish people, even observant ones who learn and study Torah, even Kabbalah, they’ve never heard of this individual,” Rabbi Hajioff said in a recent YouTube interview with Rabbi Aron Sokol. “And yet we see this character called Armilus that the siddur is saying, by the way, be wary of this individual.”
Rabbi Hajioff, a London-born educator on the Judaic studies faculty of Yeshiva University’s Stern College for Women, wrote The Future: A Guide to the Jewish Messiah, Israel, and the End of Days. He has a personal stake in the subject: his Hebrew name is Mashiach, passed down in his family of Persian Jews.
Who is the destroyer that Jewish prayer guards against without naming aloud, and why are Christians and Muslims waiting for figures that look so much like him?
“Pure, Thorough Evil”
The earliest reliable authority to describe Armilus is Rav Saadia Gaon, the 10th-century head of the Babylonian academies, in the eighth chapter of his Emunot v’De’ot (Beliefs and Opinions). Rabbi Hajioff explained that Saadia Gaon describes a figure who appears just before the revelation of Mashiach ben David, the Messiah descended from King David.
“He is real evil,” Rabbi Hajioff said. “This individual and the army that he controls is not like Gog and Magog. Gog and Magog is a political, maybe a strategic movement. Armilus may work alongside Gog and Magog, and is pure, thorough evil, and its one goal is almost like the Nazis: to take over and kill all the Jewish people. And his main target, says Rav Saadia Gaon, is Mashiach ben Yosef.”
The Talmud (Sukkah 52a) teaches that Mashiach ben Yosef will fall in battle before the final redemption. Rabbi Hajioff explained that he may be an individual or “a movement, a national revival of the Jewish people in the land of Israel,” meaning Armilus represents “a direct threat to Israel, to the Jewish people in Israel.”
The Hebrew texts of the early medieval period fill in the portrait. The Sefer Zerubbavel (Book of Zerubbabel), composed in the seventh century, describes a marble statue of a beautiful woman in Rome, with whom Satan will cohabit to produce Armilus, a cruel tyrant who rules the world and marches on Jerusalem with nine other kings. The Midrash Vayosha describes him as a deformed figure, bald, with one large eye and one small, deaf in his right ear and maimed in his right arm.
In these accounts, Armilus claims to be the Messiah and even God, and the descendants of Esau, meaning Christian Rome, accept him. Mashiach ben Yosef, named Nehemiah ben Hushiel, and his followers confront Armilus by reading him the first of the Ten Commandments, “I am the LORD, thy God.” When he demands that the Jews worship him, they cry out that he is Satan, and he kills Nehemiah in the battle that follows.
The Breath of His Lips
Armilus also appears in the Aramaic translation of the Bible. Isaiah describes the Davidic king who will judge the world:
“But with righteousness shall he judge the poor, and decide with equity for the meek of the land; and he shall smite the land with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips shall he slay the wicked.” (Isaiah 11:4)
Where the Hebrew says rasha, “the wicked one,” the Targum attributed to Yonatan ben Uziel names him: “Armilus the wicked.” The Messiah descended from David kills him with words alone.
The ending never changes across the sources. Armilus wins a temporary victory; Mashiach ben Yosef falls; Israel suffers; then Mashiach ben David arrives and destroys him. Rav Saadia Gaon writes that the Messiah will wrest Jerusalem from Armilus and kill him, bringing the true redemption.
The name itself points west. Scholars connect Armilus to Romulus, the legendary founder of Rome. Rabbi Hajioff cited a kabbalistic source holding that the gematria (Hebrew numerical value) of Armilus equals that of Melech Romi, “king of Rome.” The letters of Armilus total 347, while Melech Romi totals 346, so the match works only with the kolel, the traditional practice of adding one for the word itself.
“There seems to be some Roman connection,” Rabbi Hajioff said. “When we say Rome, we mean Rome being the center of the Catholic church, the Vatican, and there’s a lot of problems that are stirring up from that place. So Armilus also represents false messianism.”
Iran, the Ayatollahs, and the “Armilus Section”
Rabbi Hajioff offered his own reading of how Armilus may operate today. He described Armilus as possibly “the military wing” within Gog and Magog, the coalition that Ezekiel prophesies will attack Israel.
“It could be, and this is my conjecture, of course, that the Persian empire that we’re seeing today, these Ayatollahs who are controlling the Persian people, the Iranians, are actually the military wing, who are dead set, hellbent on destroying the Jewish people in the land of Israel,” he said. “We say that’s Gog and Magog, which I believe it is. However, I think that they could well be the Armilus section within Gog and Magog.”
He closed the discussion with both candidates: Armilus, he said, is coming “via either them or forces within the Christian world who are really out to destroy us specifically in the land of Israel.”
Rabbi Hajioff stressed that individuals choose whether to join the ranks of evil. “People who we see online all the time, the Tucker Carlsons of this world, who have made an absolute deliberate free choice decision to attack the Jewish people and to bring harm to our nation,” he said. “These people will be punished severely for what they’re trying to do.”
The two-faced ruler
Jewish educator Efraim Palvanov offered a very different candidate in an October interview with JTV, as Israel365 News reported. Palvanov drew a sharp line between the two end-of-days enemies.
“Armilus is the one that’s associated with Satan and with those kind of evil, impure forces. Gog is more of a political figure,” he said. “The texts describe him as actually having two heads, so to speak. Not literally two heads, but he’s a two-faced person and he kind of shapeshifts. He changes who he is, his public persona. He’s described as a figure who is incredibly haughty, who has a huge ego and who seeks to dominate the whole world. It doesn’t say about Gog that he wants to rule the whole world.”
Palvanov said an early medieval prophetic text ties Armilus to the descendants of Kedar, Ishmael’s second son, a name he connects to the modern Gulf state of Qatar. “And I suggested that it could potentially be somebody like a Donald Trump, who is very much involved with that world, with the Saudis and the Qataris, the Bnei Kedar, who does have a huge ego,” he said.
He anticipated the objection. “But Trump is so pro-Israel, right? But that’s the whole thing of Armilus being described as a two-faced person,” Palvanov said, pointing to the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico and the president’s push to acquire Greenland. He stressed that the outcome remains open. “Again, this is all speculation. I think that Trump has that potential that it could go either way. He has the free will to choose to go either way.”
Palvanov’s warning about free will matches Rabbi Hajioff’s: the role of Armilus waits for whoever volunteers to fill it.
Gog is Iran, not Putin
Rabbi Sokol played a clip of Palvanov arguing that Gog is a political figure acting from self-interest, most likely Russian President Vladimir Putin. Palvanov argued that the October 7 massacre served Putin’s interests by killing a Saudi-Israeli peace deal and a planned pipeline to Europe, drawing the world’s attention away from Ukraine, and that Putin hosted Hamas leaders in Moscow within weeks of the attack.
Rabbi Hajioff disagreed. He acknowledged that Ezekiel places Gog in the north and that Russia fits the geography, and pointed to Ezekiel 38:12-13, where Gog seeks plunder, territory and power over vulnerable nations. Ezekiel 38:16 makes clear, he said, that Gog comes into Israel to destroy the Jewish people, and Putin has no such ideological goal.
“Putin doesn’t care about Israel,” he said. “He just wants to create alliances that are going to increase the size and the power and the influence of the empire which was lost. They are not focused ideologically on the land of Israel. Iran is. Their goal is Jerusalem.”
He noted that Ezekiel lists Paras, Persia, among Gog’s allies. “Iran is the center of evil,” Rabbi Hajioff said. “They are Gog and Magog. They’re coming for us. They’re going to use money and resources from other nations, including Russia. No doubt about it. But their goal is us.”
The Christian Antichrist
Christian readers will recognize Armilus immediately. Christian tradition expects an Antichrist, a deceiver who rises at the end of days, claims divine honor, persecutes believers, and is destroyed when Jesus returns. The medieval Jewish texts drew the connection themselves. The Otot HaMashiach (Signs of the Messiah) refers to “Armilus, whom the Gentiles call Antichrist.”
The two figures share their deception, their claim to be God, and their destruction at the Messiah’s hand. They part ways over his followers. In the Jewish sources, Armilus is born in Rome, and the descendants of Esau worship him while the Jews refuse.
Islam’s False Messiah, Killed in Israel
Islam has its own version. The Dajjal, from a word meaning “deceiver,” appears in the hadith, the collected traditions of Muhammad, and is called al-Masih ad-Dajjal, the false messiah. Like Armilus, he claims first to be the Messiah and then God. Like the Armilus of Midrash Vayosha, he is marked by a deformed eye. The hadith describe him as a young man with curly hair and a protruding eye.
The Islamic tradition casts the Jews as his army. According to Sahih Muslim, one of Sunni Islam’s most authoritative collections, 70,000 Jews of Isfahan will follow him. Jesus, in this tradition a Muslim prophet, will descend at the white minaret east of Damascus, chase the Dajjal down and kill him at the gate of Lod, the Israeli city beside Ben Gurion Airport. The Muslims with Jesus will then hunt the Jews who followed the Dajjal, and the rocks and trees will reveal Jews hiding behind them, a tradition Hamas wrote into its founding charter.
Isfahan sits in the heart of Iran. Islamic tradition places the Dajjal’s army in the Jewish quarter of an Iranian city, while a rabbi of Persian descent warns that Iran’s rulers may be the army of Armilus.
The nations running to Jerusalem
Rabbi Sokol and Rabbi Hajioff turned to the opposite end of prophecy, the nations who come to Israel in peace. On Monday, the First International Congress of Noahides opened at the Seven Arches Hotel in Jerusalem. Running through November 6, the gathering, hosted by Brit Olam, the Noahide World Center, brings representatives of Noahide communities from six continents to sign a founding charter, establish an international rabbinic court and regional councils, and be received by the President of Israel at Beit HaNasi, the official residence. Noahides are non-Jews who keep the Seven Laws of Noah, the Bible’s covenant with all humanity, without converting to Judaism.
Rabbi Sokol called the congress a fulfillment of Isaiah:
“Behold, thou shalt call a nation that thou knowest not, and a nation that knew not thee shall run unto thee; because of the LORD thy God, and for the Holy One of Israel, for He hath glorified thee.” (Isaiah 55:5)
“We’re literally witnessing this prophecy alive today,” Rabbi Sokol said. He described speaking regularly with Rod Bryant, a Noahide leader in Houston, and said the congress seeks to “announce that they’re with the Jewish people” through a shared charter despite their differences.
Rabbi Hajioff called for gratitude. “Most the world has gone against us, and these individuals are coming forth to show us that they are part of our people in a sense,” he said. “They’re coming to Israel, and they’re standing at a time of potential war, shoulder-to-shoulder with us, the Jewish people, and they’re not Jewish, and they don’t want to be Jewish. They don’t need to be Jewish.”
He predicted the movement “is going to blossom and grow and become a major force within not just Israel but the entire world.” When Isaiah describes the nations streaming to the house of Jacob, Rabbi Hajioff said, “It’s talking about them.”
The choice belongs to every nation
Rabbi Hajioff insisted that no nation is destined for either role. He compared the end of days to God’s covenant with Abraham, where God foretold that Abraham’s descendants would be enslaved by a nation He did not name.
“It could well be that that nation had not actually stood up to identify itself, to volunteer,” he said. “It’s the same thing today. There could be various nations that make up Gog. Could be various individuals that make up Armilus. Everyone can decide whether they become a Satan or a malach, an angel.”
The Jews who confronted Armilus in the Sefer Zerubbavel answered him with a Torah scroll and the words “I am the LORD, thy God.” This week in Jerusalem, men and women from six continents came holding the same words, choosing the side of Israel’s God on their own. Isaiah promised that the breath of the Messiah’s lips would end Armilus. Every prayer book carries the warning in parentheses, and every nation is writing its answer now.
