Emim

Also Known As: Hebrew Eimim, also Emims in older English Bibles and Emites in some modern ones; the Moabite name for the giant people who lived in their land before them; traditionally read as the dreaded ones, from the Hebrew eimah, terror
Region/Culture: West Asia/Middle East
Mythos: Jewish Mythology, Christian Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: A vanished people of great number and great height, as tall as the Anakim and counted among the Rephaim, whose name was taken to mean the terror they caused.
Role in Mythos: They are the former owners of Moab, struck down by Chedorlaomer in the days of Abraham and gone by the time Moses leads Israel past their old country.
Relation to Humans: They are remembered only through the peoples who came after them, the Moabites who took their land and named them, and the Israelites who were told the story on the road. No Israelite ever meets one, and no hero is ever sent to fight them.

East of the Dead Sea the ground climbs hard out of the salt haze and levels into a high tableland, cut by ravines deep enough to swallow an afternoon. Wind crosses it with nothing to stop it. In the Book of Deuteronomy, Moses and the tribes of Israel are skirting this plateau after forty years in the wilderness, under orders to leave its people, the Moabites, alone. And in the middle of the marching orders the text stops to mention who used to live there.

The Emim lived there before, it says. They were a people great and many, and tall as the Anakim. Like the Anakim they are counted as Rephaim, but the Moabites call them Emim.

That is very nearly the whole file. It is a note in the margin of somebody else’s journey, two verses long, and it has kept readers busy for well over two thousand years.

The name is the first thing anyone noticed. Hebrew has a word, eimah, that means terror or dread, and Emim looks like its plural. The rabbis of late antiquity took the hint. A passage in Genesis Rabbah counts seven names the Bible uses for giants and explains each with a pun: these were the Emim because dread fell on anyone who laid eyes on them. Rashi, writing in eleventh-century France, glossed the name simply as the dreaded ones. Modern handbooks are cooler about it. The name was the Moabites’ word, not Israel’s, and its real origin cannot be proved. It may be a foreign name that Hebrew ears bent toward a word they knew. Either way, the Terrors is what stuck.

What daily life looked like for a Terror, nobody recorded. The plateau itself suggests the outline. A herdsman from the valley brings his goats up the slope at first light, smelling dust and thyme, and finds the skyline already occupied: figures standing at the edge of the tableland, too long in the leg, watching the pass without hurry. He turns the goats around. Nothing has been said, and nothing needed to be.

Their one appearance in a story comes earlier, in Genesis, and it does not go well for them. In the days of Abram, four kings from the east led by Chedorlaomer of Elam came down the highway beyond the Jordan to punish a rebellion. On the way they broke every people in their path. They struck the Rephaim at Ashteroth Karnaim, the Zuzim at Ham, and the Emim at Shaveh Kiriathaim, the plain of Kiriathaim, a town of the Moabite plateau that the Moabite king Mesha would still be boasting of rebuilding in his own inscription centuries later. Then the army went on to Seir, turned back, routed the kings of Sodom and Gomorrah in a valley full of tar pits, and carried off Abram’s nephew Lot.

So the dreaded ones enter the Bible already losing. The plain after that battle can be guessed at: trampled barley, smoke standing straight up in the heat, the eastern army already a line of dust moving south. The text spares it four words and moves on.

There is a small irony tucked into the sequence. Lot, the man the raiders carried away, is the ancestor the Bible gives to Moab. The people who would one day own the Emim’s country, and give them the only name by which anyone remembers them, descend from a captive taken on the same campaign that broke them.

How the Emim finally lost the land is not told. Deuteronomy says plainly that the Horites of Seir were driven out by the sons of Esau, and that the Zamzummim, the matching giants of Ammon next door, were destroyed so the Ammonites could settle in their place. For the Emim it says only that they lived there formerly. They were there, and then Moab was. Nobody wrote down the war.

Nor does anyone say where they came from. They have no founding ancestor, no named king, no single champion. The Anakim have Anak and his three sons at Hebron. The Rephaim have Og of Bashan and his iron bed nine cubits long. The Emim are a crowd without a face. Later tradition folded them in with the Nephilim, the giants born before the Flood, because the rabbinic list of seven names treats all such peoples as one kind under different labels. The Bible itself never draws that line.

Their strength lay in size and in numbers, and above all in reputation. A people named Terror by its neighbours had won half its fights before they started. They held high, defensible ground along the main road between Damascus and the Red Sea, and for a time that was enough.

Their limits are just as clear. Whatever dread they inspired did not slow a professional army with somewhere else to be. They could be beaten in the open field, they could be replaced by ordinary herdsmen, and they could be forgotten so thoroughly that their own name for themselves is lost. By the time Israel walked past, the land was simply called Moab, and the giants were a sentence an old man added so the young would know the hills had a history.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who were the Emim in the Bible?

The Emim were a people of giants who lived east of the Dead Sea in the land that later became Moab. Deuteronomy describes them as great, numerous and as tall as the Anakim, and says they were counted among the Rephaim. Emim was the name the Moabites gave them.

What does the name Emim mean?

Emim is traditionally read as the dreaded ones or the terrors, from the Hebrew word eimah, meaning terror. Genesis Rabbah says they were called Emim because dread fell on anyone who saw them, and Rashi explains the name the same way. The true origin of the name is not proven, since it was a Moabite word and may have been reshaped to sound like Hebrew.

Where are the Emim mentioned in the Bible?

The Emim are mentioned in two places. Genesis 14:5 says Chedorlaomer and his allied kings defeated them at Shaveh Kiriathaim in the days of Abram. Deuteronomy 2:10-11 says they once lived in the land of Moab and were as tall as the Anakim.

What happened to the Emim?

The Bible does not say how the Emim came to an end. Genesis records their defeat by Chedorlaomer, and Deuteronomy says only that they formerly lived in Moab. By the time of Moses the Moabites held the land, and no account of a war between Moab and the Emim survives.

Are the Emim the same as the Rephaim and the Nephilim?

Deuteronomy says the Emim were counted as Rephaim, so the Bible treats them as one branch of that wider giant people. The Bible never calls them Nephilim. That link comes from later rabbinic tradition, which lists Emim, Rephaim and Nephilim among seven names for giants.