The Battles of Armageddon is a meticulous chronicle of the dozens of military clashes over the centuries that have given an aura of apocalyptic expectation to a small patch of valley in northern Israel. Television-evangelists and Bible-thumpers all over the world continue to whip up their followers with nightmarish visions of nuclear disaster and divine judgment linked to the ominous word “Armageddon.” But for those who care to dig a little deeper, Eric H. Cline of The George Washington University masterfully shows us that a long, violent, and tangled history lies behind that name. Cline systematically reveals the millennium-long steps by which certain arbitrary topographic realities, unchanging military technologies, and the relative geographical positions of the great Near Eastern empires made the site of Megiddo—and indeed all of the Jezreel Valley—a tragically tiresome cockpit of war.