HistoricalChristian.Faith

Did Og survive the Flood by clinging to the ark?

Type: supporting argument (off-timeline) · Assessment: weak — the legend is genuinely ancient and answers a real crux (Deuteronomy 3:11's giant "remnant" after a Flood that killed all flesh), but as an account of what happened it collides head-on with Genesis 7:23's "Noah only remained," and the tradition rescues it only by an ad hoc and otherwise unattested miracle. Its two rabbinic forms undercut each other, its source-base is late aggadah, and its best reading is etiological — on which it is not a claim about the Flood's extent at all and lends no support to a local-flood reading.

Related arguments: the post-Flood Nephilim problem — see also a second angelic incursion after the Flood · a giant bloodline carried through the ark · the giants as a warrior category rather than a lineage

The claim

… except Og, king of Bashan, who sat down on a piece of wood under the gutter of the ark. He swore to Noah and to his sons that he would be their servant for ever. What did Noah do? He bored an aperture in the ark, and he put (through it) his food daily for him, and he also was left, as it is said, "For only Og, king of Bashan, remained of the remnant of the giants" (Deut. 3:11).

— Pirqei de-Rabbi Eliezer 23, Sefaria. The interpretation assessed here is a survival mechanism for the post-Flood giants that runs outside the hull: Og, an antediluvian giant, rode out the deluge clinging to the ark and so became the "remnant of the Rephaim" that Deuteronomy 3:11 reports still living generations later. It is a distinct claim from the bloodline reading (a giant inheritance carried inside the family) and from a second incursion (a fresh event after the Flood). The question this page weighs is whether that survival-outside-the-hull legend coheres with the Flood the text describes.¹

Who advances it

The legend is rabbinic aggadah. Its narrative form is in Pirqei de-Rabbi Eliezer 23 (Og on a plank under the ark's gutter, fed daily through an aperture) and in Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Genesis 14:13, where Og "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" — kept alive, the Targum adds, not for any merit but so that the world might see the power of God. The Babylonian Talmud develops it and presses it against its own difficulty: Zevachim 113b asks outright how Og, "who according to tradition was of the generation of the flood," could "survive the boiling water," and Niddah 61a numbers Og among that doomed generation, makes him the "fugitive" of Genesis 14:13 who brought Abraham word of Lot's capture, and has Moses himself fear Og's accumulated merit.² The motif is carried forward in the modern popular giant-and-prophecy literature, where it is canvassed alongside the bloodline and second-incursion options as one of the ways the giants are said to have crossed the Flood.³

The evidence for

It answers a real crux, and answers it from the same texts. Deuteronomy 3:11 calls Og "of the remnant of the Rephaim." If the Rephaim were antediluvian and the Flood killed all flesh, a remnant of them walking around in Moses' day is a genuine problem — the same problem Genesis 6:4 poses when it says the Nephilim were on the earth "and also after that." The Og legend supplies a concrete channel across the divide, and it is drawn from the very verse that creates the difficulty rather than imported from outside it. It is also, unlike the modern bloodline hypothesis, an authentically ancient answer.

The tradition registers the difficulty rather than ignoring it. The mark of exegetical seriousness here is that the rabbis do not simply assert the survival — they raise the objection themselves. Zevachim 113b poses the challenge "the people of the generation of the flood sinned with boiling heat and were punished with boiling heat," and asks how Og stood in it. That the sources see the tension and reach for an answer is a point in the legend's favour as exegesis, whatever the answer's merits.

On a non-global reading it needs no miracle at all. The strongest form of the coherence claim does not lean on the ark at all. The same Talmudic passage preserves the opinion of Rabbi Yoḥanan that "the flood did not descend upon Eretz Yisrael." On that reading a giant standing in the land was simply never under the water, and Og's survival is no contradiction of anything — it is what a geographically limited Flood would leave behind. So the legend has a version that coheres with the biblical totality language by scoping that language to the inhabited world of the account, which is the same move made by the anthropological-extent reading of the Flood.⁴

Adversarial assessment

What holds. The crux is real, the answer is ancient, and it is honestly reached for. Deuteronomy 3:11 does report a giant remnant after the Flood; the tradition did notice the problem and did not paper over it. None of that is invented.

As history it collides directly with Genesis 7:23. The text does not merely say the waters were high; it says who lived: "every living substance was destroyed which was upon the face of the ground … and Noah only remained alive, and they that were with him in the ark." A giant surviving outside the hull is precisely the case that verse forecloses — not a gap the narrative leaves open but a claim it makes in the opposite direction. On the global-Flood reading the legend does not sit awkwardly with the text; it contradicts it.¹

The tradition's fix is a miracle invoked solely to save the story. Confronted with the boiling-water objection, Zevachim 113b resolves it not by evidence but by fiat: "a miracle was performed for them, namely that the water on the sides of the ark cooled." This wiki does not discount a claim merely because it requires a miracle, and grants freely that God could have cooled the water. But possibility is not proof. The cooled-water miracle is attested nowhere but in the passage that needs it, is postulated for no reason except to rescue a legend the text reads against, and is told frankly as legend — Targum Pseudo-Jonathan says outright that Og was kept alive "that the world might see the power of God." So the supernatural allowance does not rescue the reading: it is weak not because a miracle is involved but because the miracle is unattested, ad hoc, and load-bearing for a story with no independent support.²

The two rabbinic forms undercut each other. The legend does not present a single coherent survival account; it presents a crux with rival patches. If Og needed to cling to the ark's roof and the water beside it needed to be miraculously cooled, then the Flood plainly did cover his location — Reish Lakish's position that "the flood descended upon Eretz Yisrael." But Rabbi Yoḥanan, in the same breath, holds that it did not, in which case Og needed neither the ark nor the miracle. A tradition that offers a survivor-on-the-ark and a Flood-that-missed-his-country as alternative answers to the same question is displaying the signature of aggadic problem-solving, not preserving a single remembered event.

And the source-base is late. None of these witnesses is early attestation of a Flood-era event. Pirqei de-Rabbi Eliezer is an eighth- or ninth-century compilation, Targum Pseudo-Jonathan is late, and the Talmudic discussions are amoraic — many centuries downstream of any horizon the Flood account describes. As exegesis of Deuteronomy 3:11 these texts are what they are; as testimony to what happened outside the ark they carry no evidential weight.³

Its best reading dissolves the coherence question rather than winning it. Read as what it is — aggadah — the legend is an etiological answer to Deuteronomy 3:11 and a peg for Og's larger dossier (the Genesis 14:13 "fugitive," the merit Moses feared, the iron bedstead). On that reading it is not a claim about the Flood's extent at all, so it neither establishes a local Flood nor supplies a genuine survival mechanism; the coherence question is a category mistake applied to a narrative that never purported to be a report. Pressed the other way — asked to function as history — it fails at Genesis 7:23. Either way it does not deliver a survival mechanism that coheres with the Flood the text describes.⁵

The crux it answers may not need answering. The warrior-category reading — the strongest of the three post-Flood readings on the evidence — takes Deuteronomy 3:11's "remnant of the Rephaim" as an ethnographic and comparative label rather than a surviving antediluvian bloodline, in which case there is no antediluvian giant needing to cross the Flood in the first place. If that reading holds, the Og-on-the-ark legend is a vivid solution to a problem that dissolves on a closer look at the vocabulary.

Assessment

Weak — not unsupported. The legend is genuinely ancient, is advocated, and answers a real exegetical crux from the very verse that creates it; a reading with that pedigree is not nothing, and its non-global variant is a coherent (if separately contested) way to relieve the tension.

But as an account of a giant surviving the Flood it does not hold on its best available case. Genesis 7:23 says Noah "only remained alive," which is exactly what a survivor outside the hull denies; the tradition's rescue is an ad hoc, otherwise-unattested miracle told frankly as legend; its own two forms — Og on the ark versus a Flood that missed Eretz Yisrael — undercut each other; and its source-base is aggadah many centuries late. Its strongest reading is etiological, on which it makes no historical survival claim and provides no support for a local Flood; its weakest is literal, on which it contradicts the text. Of the three survival channels grouped here it is the frailest: unlike the second incursion it cannot leave the Flood's totality standing, and unlike the bloodline reading it does not even keep its survivor inside the boat.

Sources