HistoricalChristian.Faith

Who Was Og of Bashan?

Og is the giant king of Bashan whom Israel destroyed on the march to Canaan — and the one figure of the conquest the Hebrew Bible pauses to measure. He “went out against” Israel “to battle at Edrei,” and the LORD told Moses, “Fear him not: for I have delivered him into thy hand… thou shalt do to him as thou didst unto Sihon king of the Amorites” (Numbers 21:33–35). His was a kingdom of “threescore cities… the region of Argob… which was called the land of giants” (Deuteronomy 3:4–13), ruled from Astaroth in Edrei. Then comes the verse the whole later tradition turns on: “For only Og king of Bashan remained of the remnant of giants; behold, his bedstead was a bedstead of iron… nine cubits was the length thereof, and four cubits the breadth of it, after the cubit of a man” (Deuteronomy 3:11) — the Bible’s one piece of giant-metrology outside Goliath’s six-cubit height.

Scripture keeps his memory as a byword for the mighty overthrown. Og is “of the remnant of the giants” — the last of the Rephaim — who “dwelt at Ashtaroth and at Edrei” (Joshua 12:4; 13:12); the Psalms twice set him beside Sihon among the “great kings” and “famous kings” the LORD “slew” — “and Og the king of Bashan: for his mercy endureth for ever” (Psalm 136:20; 135:11); Nehemiah’s levites rehearse the same conquest (Nehemiah 9:22). On those few verses a long memory grew: the rabbis made Og an antediluvian who outrode the Flood on the roof of Noah’s ark and later tried to crush the camp of Israel under an uprooted mountain; the Fathers read him as a type of the powers cast down, and pinned his cities to real towns of Roman Arabia “where giants dwelt”; and modern scholarship, recovering the Ugaritic rpʾum, reads “the last of the Rephaim, who dwelt at Ashtaroth and Edrei” against a Canaanite cult of the deified royal dead — Bashan as an underworld frontier.

This page is a biographical tradition-timeline: not a life of Og but a history of what was said and believed about him across the centuries, set out earliest source first. Its “witnesses” are the datable sources that report on or interpret him — the Torah and its Old Testament echoes, the Septuagint, Josephus, the Greek and Latin Fathers (Origen, Eusebius, Jerome, Augustine, Bede), and the long rabbinic tradition that made him the great survivor-giant. The genuinely contested questions — is the iron “bedstead” the measure of a giant, a sarcophagus, or a cult-object echoing the bed of Marduk? did Og really outlive the Flood? is “the last of the Rephaim” a giant, a shade, or both? — are weighed on their own argument pages (on the Nephilim and material-record timelines) rather than settled here. Og is the capstone of a recurring biblical type, the giant of the doomed nations, whose nearest kin are the Anakim of Hebron, the Emim and Zamzummim of Transjordan (Deuteronomy 2:10–21), and the Philistine champion Goliath of Gath.

Related doctrines: Figures of the Hebrew Scriptures — see also Balaam son of Beor · Melchizedek · Nimrod · Enoch · Job · Naaman the Syrian · Jannes and Jambres · the Queen of Sheba · Jethro · Rahab of Jericho · Nebuchadnezzar · Cyrus the Great · the death of Moses · the curse of Ham · Shem son of Noah · Cain

Timeline

The biblical portrait (Numbers 21; Deuteronomy 1–3; Joshua 12–13; the Psalms)

Everything the tradition made of Og begins as a campaign notice. On the road north Israel turns “by the way of Bashan,” and “Og the king of Bashan went out against them, he, and all his people, to the battle at Edrei.” The verdict is Sihon’s over again: “the LORD said unto Moses, Fear him not… So they smote him, and his sons, and all his people, until there was none left him alive; and they possessed his land.” Deuteronomy repeats it and enlarges the kingdom — “threescore cities… all the region of Argob, the kingdom of Og in Bashan… which was called the land of giants” — and the Psalms fix him in Israel’s memory as one of the “great” and “famous kings” the LORD struck down: “Sihon king of the Amorites… and Og the king of Bashan… for his mercy endureth for ever.”¹

Twice the record adds what no other conquered king receives: a measure and a lineage. Og is “of the remnant of the giants” — the last of the Rephaim — “which dwelt at Ashtaroth and at Edrei,” and Deuteronomy points the reader to a surviving relic: “behold, his bedstead was a bedstead of iron; is it not in Rabbath of the children of Ammon? nine cubits was the length thereof, and four cubits the breadth of it, after the cubit of a man.” Nine cubits by four — on the ordinary cubit, some thirteen feet by six. Whether that measures the man, his coffin, or his throne-couch is the crux the later tradition and the argument pages below dispute; the notice itself is spare, and Amos, recalling the Amorite kings of Transjordan, keeps only the note of scale: “whose height was like the height of the cedars, and he was strong as the oaks.”²

The Septuagint (3rd–2nd century BC) — “of the Raphain… a bed of iron”

The Greek translators, rendering Deuteronomy for Alexandrian Jewry, keep the datum but not the gloss. Where the King James would later say “the remnant of giants,” the Septuagint simply transliterates the Hebrew — “For only Og the king of Basan was left of the Raphain: behold, his bed was a bed of iron (klīnē sidēra)… the length of it is nine cubits, and the breadth of it four cubits, according to the cubit of a man.” The word for “giants,” gigantes, that the Greek does use elsewhere for the Nephilim and Rephaim, is not used at this verse: the earliest translation leaves “of the Raphain” standing as an untranslated proper name. The bed, and its exact dimensions, pass into Greek unchanged — the object every later witness would seize on.³

Josephus (Antiquities of the Jews 4.5.3, c. AD 93) — the giant king and his iron bed at Rabbath

The earliest datable treatment after the Bible turns the terse notice into a portrait. Retelling the war for a Greco-Roman readership, Josephus makes Og a marvel of stature and bearing — “Og had very few equals, either in the largeness of his body, or handsomeness of his appearance… a man of great activity in the use of his hands” — and then reads his size directly off the relic Deuteronomy names: “men could easily guess at his strength and magnitude when they took his bed at Rabbath, the royal city of the Ammonites; its structure was of iron, its breadth four cubits, and its length a cubit more than double thereto.” He takes the “bedstead” as literal furniture and the measure as the measure of the man — the reading the whole giant tradition, Jewish and Christian, would follow.⁴ Full detail »

Origen of Alexandria (Homilies on Joshua 3, c. AD 240) — Og among the “kings of the contrary powers”

The Christian reading begins allegorically. Preaching through Joshua, Origen contrasts the few kings Moses felled east of the Jordan with the many that fall once “Jesus” (the Greek Joshua) leads: “Sihon only… king of the Amorites, and Og king of Bashan, and the Amalekites, they cast down beyond the Jordan. But where Jesus leads the army, now five kings fall at once.” Og is read not as a curiosity of size but as one of the “kings of the contrary powers” — a spiritual adversary overthrown — the figural key the Fathers preferred to the metrology that fascinated Josephus and the rabbis.⁵

Eusebius of Caesarea (Onomasticon, c. AD 325) — Og’s cities, “where giants dwelt”

Eusebius, cataloguing the places of Scripture for pilgrims, pins Og’s kingdom to the real map of Roman Arabia and preserves the giant-tradition attached to it. Of Astarōth: “the ancient city of Og… where giants dwelled… located in the Batanea six miles from Adraa.” Of Edrai: “whence the gigantic Og, king of Basan… now there is Adra, a famous city of Arabia, twenty-four miles from Bostra.” The two towns Joshua gives “the remnant of the Rephaim” are, for Eusebius, findable ground — and their memory is still a memory of giants.⁶

Jerome (Commentaries on Isaiah, Micah, and Amos, c. AD 393–410) — Bashan the land of “confusion,” and the cedar-giant who is Sihon

Jerome carries Og into the Latin West by way of etymology. Bashan, he explains, means “ignominy” or “confusion” — “Basan is a region in Arabia, over which Og ruled… interpreted as αἰσχύνη, that is, ignominy” — and there is “another confusion that leads to death, in which Og, the king of Bashan, once dwelt.” Reading Amos’s cedar-tall Amorite, though, Jerome is careful not to make him Og: the giant “lofty and strong like a cedar and an oak” whose “fruit” God broke “from above” is Sihon, Og’s brother-king of Heshbon — a distinction later giant-lore often blurs.⁷

Augustine of Hippo (Expositions on the Psalms 135–136, c. AD 415) — Og “the heaper-together,” a figure of the devil

Augustine, expounding the two psalms that name Og, presses the etymology all the way to the enemy of souls. On Psalm 136’s “And Og, the king of Basan”: “The ‘heaper-together,’ such is the meaning of Og, and, king of ‘confusion,’ which Basan signifies. For what else does the devil heap together but confusion?” On Psalm 135 he draws the moral from the slaughter of the mighty kings: “When you see what has been done to the wicked, take heed lest it be done to you… God… drove out the wicked.” Where Josephus saw a giant’s body, Augustine sees a name to be allegorized — Og the type of the accumulating adversary God casts out.⁸

The Venerable Bede (Commentary on Genesis, on Genesis 14:5, c. AD 720) — “Rephaim in Greek are called Giants”

Bede, reading the raid of the eastern kings, states plainly the equation the Septuagint had left implicit and hands it to the medieval West. At Ashtaroth-Karnaim — one of Og’s own cities — the kings “struck the Rephaim… Rephaim in Hebrew, in Greek are called Giants: in the singular number… a Rephaim is called a Giant. Now their land… Ashtaroth-karnaim… because indeed they were the dwellings of strong men.” The Rephaim of whom Og is “the remnant” are, for Bede, simply the Giants — and their city is the seat of “strong men.”⁹

The rabbinic tradition (Targum Pseudo-Jonathan; the Babylonian Talmud; Pirqei de-Rabbi Eliezer; traditions from c. AD 200, redacted c. 500–800) — the antediluvian who outrode the Flood

Jewish tradition made Og the great survivor. He is no mere Amorite but an antediluvian — brother of Sihon and, in one strand, a son of the fallen Watchers: “Sihon and Og were brothers… sons of Ahijah, son of Shamhazai,” and Rabbi Yoḥanan reads the fugitive “one that was saved” of Genesis 14:13 as “Og, who was saved from the punishment of the generation of the flood.” The Targum tells how: “Og came, who had been spared from the giants that died in the deluge, and had ridden protected upon the top of the ark, and sustained with food by Noah”; Pirqei de-Rabbi Eliezer adds that Og “sat down on a piece of wood under the gutter of the ark… he swore to Noah… that he would be their servant for ever,” and Noah “bored an aperture in the ark… his food daily.” Deuteronomy 3:11’s “only Og… remained” is read as proof of the escape, and the Talmud even worries how he stood in the Flood’s boiling water.¹⁰

And where Scripture measures only his bed, the aggadah measures the giant himself in mountains. At the last, Og “said: How large is the camp of Israel? It is three parasangs. I will go and uproot a mountain three parasangs long and I will hurl it upon them and kill them.” God sent grasshoppers that “pierced the peak of the mountain and it fell on his neck… his teeth were extended to one side of his head and to the other and he was unable to remove it”; and Moses, “ten cubits tall,” “took an axe ten cubits long, jumped up ten cubits, and struck Og in the ankle and killed him.” The rabbis reserve this genuinely cosmic scale for Og alone — not even Goliath is drawn so large.¹¹ Full detail »

The modern recovery: Og and the Ugaritic Rephaim (19th–21st century)

The decipherment of the Ugaritic tablets from Ras Shamra opened a third reading of “the last of the Rephaim.” In the Ugaritic libation-prayer KTU 1.108 the god Rapiu — divine patron of the rpʾum, the cognate of the biblical Rephaim — is enthroned precisely “in Ashtaroth… in Edrei,” the very two cities Deuteronomy and Joshua assign Og; and a second liturgy (KTU 1.161) summons the rpʾum as the deified spirits of dead kings. On this line (first pressed by Baruch Margulis and built out by Michael Heiser and others) “Og… of the remnant of the Rephaim, who dwelt at Ashtaroth and Edrei” reads as at once a giant king and a shade, and Bashan — a region whose name puns on the word for “serpent” — as a Canaanite frontier of the underworld. How far that recovery carries is disputed, and is weighed on the argument pages below; but it has made Og, once a footnote of the conquest, a hinge of the whole Rephaim question.¹²

Arguments

The contested questions about Og are weighed on their own argument pages, which live on the timelines where they were first adduced — the Nephilim and the material-record timelines. They are gathered here as a hub; each is rated there, not re-argued here.

Is Og’s “iron bed” (Deuteronomy 3:11) evidence of a giant? — weak (as material evidence of gigantism)

The nine-by-four-cubit iron ʿereś at Rabbath-Ammon is the Bible’s most concrete giant-datum, and Josephus already read it as the measure of Og’s body. But it is a text reporting an object, not a recovered one: no bed survives to examine, a bedstead need not match its occupant, and the “iron” and the public display point as easily to a monument or a dolmen of the megalithic Golan as to a sleeper thirteen feet tall. Honest as ancient testimony to a tradition of a giant; weak as material proof of one. (On what the dimensions mean, a separate question, see the next entry.)

Og’s bed and the bed of Marduk — sound (the dimensional parallel)

Read not as furniture but as a cult-object, Og’s iron bed — nine by four cubits — answers to the dimensions of Marduk’s cultic bed at Babylon recorded on the Esagil tablet, tagging the giant king with the trappings of a Mesopotamian divine kingship. The dimensional parallel is well-grounded (the cuneiform source and the peer-reviewed argument hold up), which is why the reading is rated sound — distinct from, and stronger than, the claim that the bed proves a literal giant.

Og’s cities Ashtaroth and Edrei as the seat of the Ugaritic Rapiu (KTU 1.108) — sound

The single firmest pillar under the supernatural reading of Og: the Ugaritic libation-prayer KTU 1.108 enthrones the god Rapiu — patron of the rpʾum/Rephaim — at Ashtaroth and Edrei, the exact two towns the Bible gives “Og… of the remnant of the Rephaim.” The name-link is undisputed and the geography converges, so the core identification is now-majority Ugaritology, rated sound; it grounds “Og = a surviving Rephaim / Rephaim = divinized royal dead” with no need of the bed or any performed rite.

The Rephaim as the spirits of dead kings (KTU 1.161) — sound

The companion identification behind “the last of the Rephaim”: the Ugaritic royal funerary liturgy KTU 1.161 invokes the rpʾum as the deified spirits of dead kings, illuminating Isaiah 14 and Psalm 88 — near-consensus scholarship, rated sound in its core, with the bridge from these underworld shades to the giant Rephaim of the conquest the genuinely debated step.

Did Og survive the Flood by clinging to the ark? — weak (as history)

The rabbinic legend that Og outrode the deluge on the ark’s roof answers a real crux — how a giant “remnant” stands after a Flood that killed all flesh — but as an account of what happened it collides head-on with “Noah only remained” (Genesis 7:23), and the tradition’s own forms undercut each other (a cooling miracle for the boiling water; a dispute over whether the Flood even reached his land). Rated weak as history — a vivid answer to the puzzle, not a report of the event.

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