Og

Somewhere in Rabbah of the Ammonites there was a bed that no one could move. Nine cubits long, four wide, framed or fitted with iron, and still on public view generations after its owner died: about thirteen feet of frame for a single sleeper. Deuteronomy mentions it the way a guide mentions a relic, with a nudge and a question. Is it not in Rabbah of the children of Ammon? Anyone could go and look.

The man it belonged to was Og, an Amorite king who held Bashan, the black basalt tableland east of the Sea of Galilee where the stone still rings underfoot and holds the day’s heat long after dark. He kept his seat at Ashtaroth and ruled from Edrei. Sixty cities were his, all of them walled high and shut with gates and bars, and beyond them a scatter of open villages in the district called Argob. It was a serious kingdom, not a bandit’s hill fort, and the roads through it were the roads into Canaan.

He is first seen doing what kings of that country did. Israel turned north up the Bashan road, and Og came out to meet them, he and all his people, and drew up for battle on the plain at Edrei. Later Jewish storytellers could not resist improving the scene: they put him sitting on the city wall with his legs hanging down eighteen cubits to the dust, so that Moses, looking up, could not work out what he was looking at until God told him. Sentries would have walked past his shins on their rounds without reaching his knee.

The Bible does not linger. Og lost, and his people were killed to the last man, and the sixty cities with their gates and bars went to the descendants of Machir son of Manasseh. That should have been the end of him. Instead his name settled into the liturgy: Sihon king of the Amorites and Og king of Bashan, recited in the Psalms among the standard proofs that God keeps promises, a defeated giant filed permanently under evidence.

Then there is the bed. Deuteronomy is careful to say the measurement follows the ordinary human cubit, which is either a helpful precision or a warning, and the verse does not say which. Scholars have argued over it since historical criticism began. The oldest and most popular reading makes it a basalt sarcophagus, since iron bedsteads are odd and Bashan has basalt in quantity, except that Rabbath-Ammon, where the thing was supposedly displayed, does not. A newer proposal treats it as a real bed decorated with iron fittings, on the model of the ivory-inlaid couches that Amos sneers at. One recent study of the verse concluded flatly that an iron bedstead and an iron coffin are almost equally improbable, which is an honest place to leave it.

What Og was called matters more than what he slept on. He is the remnant of the Rephaim, and that word does two jobs in the Hebrew Bible. In Transjordan the Rephaim are a vanished people of giants, tall enemies from the far past. Everywhere else they are the dead, the shades lying in the lowest part of Sheol who do not rise. The Ugaritic texts, three centuries older than the biblical account and written a few hundred miles north, use the cognate word for dead kings and heroes summoned to the feast, given wine, asked for blessing. One of those texts hails a figure called Rp’u, king of eternity, and places the god who honours him in two towns whose names read as Ashtaroth and Edrei. Og’s capital and Og’s battlefield. Whatever the writers of Deuteronomy knew or did not know, the last of the Rephaim held court in exactly the two places where the older tradition already put them.

His origin is entirely a rabbinic invention, and it is a magnificent one. Og was not drowned in the Flood. One account says the water only came up to his ankles. Another has him escape to the land of Israel, where it did not rain. A third seats him on a rung of the ladder outside the ark, having sworn to be a slave to Noah and his sons, taking his daily food through a hole cut in the hull. The Talmud makes him and Sihon brothers, grandsons of one Shamhazai, a name that appears nowhere else in the Talmud but belongs elsewhere to the chief of the fallen angels.

He is also identified with the anonymous fugitive of Genesis who brought Abram word that Lot had been captured. The midrash gives him a motive: he expected Abraham to go after the raiding kings and die, leaving Sarah free to marry. He was rewarded with long life for carrying the message and sentenced to die at the hands of Abraham’s descendants for the reason he carried it. At the feast for the weaning of Isaac, having spent years insisting that Abraham would never father a child, he was asked what he thought now, and said the boy was nothing, that he could kill him with one finger. For that he was condemned to live long enough to watch a hundred thousand of Abraham’s descendants grow up, and then to be killed by them.

The killing itself is the most famous story about him. Og tore up a mountain three parasangs across, exactly the width of the Israelite camp, and lifted it over his head to drop the whole thing on them at once. While he carried it a swarm of insects bored through the rock, and the loosened clod slid down and settled round his neck like a collar. He tried to shrug it off, and his teeth grew out sideways from his mouth and locked it in place. Moses, ten cubits tall, took an axe ten cubits long, jumped ten cubits into the air, reached his ankle and cut him down.

Everything he had came with a limit built into it. His size gave him the strength to carry a hillside and no way to reach his own feet. His long life was a wage paid in advance for an act he performed out of spite, so the same decree that granted it named the people who would end it. Even his survival of the Flood was purchased with an oath of slavery, and the oath held. In the Islamic retelling he is ʿŪj ibn ʿAnāq, a son of Cain who lived three thousand years, big enough to stand knee-deep in the ocean and fish whales out to fry them, and Moses strikes him on the heel and his falling body lands across the Nile and makes a bridge. He turns up in the illustrated Stories of the Prophets from fifteenth-century Baghdad or Tabriz, sprawled across the middle of the page while Muhammad and the infant Jesus occupy the corners. He is not in the Qur’an. He did not need to be.

The Talmud keeps one last measurement, offered with a straight face. A man digging a grave chased a stag three miles inside one of Og’s bones and never reached the other end.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Og, king of Bashan?

Og was an Amorite king who ruled the region of Bashan, east of the Sea of Galilee, from Ashtaroth and Edrei. He held sixty fortified cities and was defeated and killed by Israel under Moses at the battle of Edrei. Deuteronomy calls him the last survivor of the Rephaim, a people of giants.

How big was Og?

The Hebrew Bible never states Og’s height. It gives only the size of his iron bed, nine cubits long and four wide, roughly thirteen feet by six, which is the whole basis for calling him a giant. Later rabbinic tradition abandoned restraint and described his legs as eighteen cubits long.

What is the bed of Og?

The bed of Og is an iron bedstead nine cubits by four that Deuteronomy says was still on display in Rabbah of the Ammonites. Scholars disagree about what it actually was: the oldest proposal makes it a basalt sarcophagus, while a newer one treats it as a wooden bed decorated with iron fittings. Neither reading is comfortable, and one recent study called an iron bed and an iron coffin about equally unlikely.

How did Og die?

In the biblical account Israel defeated Og in battle at Edrei and killed him along with his sons and all his people. The Talmud tells it far more elaborately: Og uprooted a mountain to hurl at the Israelite camp, insects bored through it so that it dropped around his neck, and Moses leapt ten cubits with a ten cubit axe and struck him on the ankle.

Did Og survive Noah’s Flood?

Rabbinic tradition says he did, and offers three different explanations. In one the floodwater only reached his ankles, in another he fled to a land where it did not rain, and in a third he clung to a rung outside the ark after swearing to be Noah’s slave and was fed through a hole in the hull. None of this appears in the Bible itself.

Related Entries

Rephaite, Zamzummim, Anak, Nephilim, Grigori, Moses, Noah, Gog, Behemoth, Leviathan, Baal, Giant, Gigantes, Antaeus, Ymir