Zamzummim

The limestone country east of the Jordan climbs in bare shelves toward the desert, and in summer the wind across it is dry enough to crack lips. Before the Ammonites held that high ground, somebody else did. The Ammonites remembered them as giants, and the name they gave them was not the kind of name anyone chooses for himself. Zamzummim. The word occurs exactly once in the Hebrew Bible, and it is very nearly all that is left of them.

Deuteronomy sets it down in a parenthesis. Moses is recalling the long march around the edges of Edom and Moab, and the text keeps pausing for antiquarian footnotes about who used to live where. Moab, it notes, once belonged to the Emim, a people great and numerous and as tall as the Anakim. Seir belonged to the Horites until the descendants of Esau wiped them out and settled in their place. Then comes Ammon. It too was counted Rephaim country, Rephaim had lived there in former times, and the Ammonites called them Zamzummim: great, numerous, tall as the Anakim, the same three measurements again. God wiped them out, the Ammonites dispossessed them and took their place, and the sentence moves straight on to the Avvim of the villages near Gaza, destroyed by the Caphtorim who came out of Crete.

Two verses. That is the entire biblical record of a nation.

The footnotes have a job. They sit inside an order forbidding Israel to harass Ammon or start a fight there, because that land had already been assigned to the descendants of Lot. The point being made is that peoples had been lifted off this ground and replaced before, by the same hand, and that Israel’s turn was not a novelty. The giants are evidence in somebody else’s argument. Their extinction is a precedent, cited the way a lawyer cites a case.

Then there is the name, which sounds like something shouted over a border. Hebrew offers the root zamam, to devise or plot, and with it a reading of the schemers. Arabic offers zamzama, to mutter, to talk gibberish, and that comparison has proved harder to resist. On that reading the Zamzummim are the mumblers. On a still evening their talk would have carried from the next ridge, rising and falling, near enough to hear and too strange to follow, a steady hum with no words in it. It is the trick the Greeks played with barbaros: name a people after the noise their language makes to someone who has decided not to learn it.

They were Rephaim, and the Rephaim collected names the way a coastline collects wrecks. Israel said Rephaim. Moab said Emim, a word close to the Hebrew for terror. Ammon said Zamzummim. Three sets of neighbours, three verdicts. The word Rephaim leads a double life as well. In the historical books it names the tall peoples of the old Transjordan; in the poetry of Isaiah and the Psalms it names the shades of the dead, the thin and powerless residents of Sheol. The last of the living kind, Deuteronomy says, was Og of Bashan, and his bedstead of iron, nine cubits long and four wide, was still to be seen in Rabbah of the Ammonites, the capital of the people who had taken the Zamzummim’s land. Cold iron the length of two tall men, sitting in the conquerors’ city.

Genesis may carry an earlier glimpse of them. In the fourteenth year of the eastern kings’ war, Chedorlaomer and the kings with him struck the old peoples east of the Jordan one after another: the Rephaim at Ashteroth-karnaim, the Zuzim at Ham, the Emim at Shaveh-kiriathaim. The order is Deuteronomy’s, with Zuzim standing exactly where Zamzummim ought to be, and Rashi settled it for traditional readers in a single line: these are the Zamzummim. The ancient translators rendered Zuzim as the strong ones. Modern readers have argued it both ways, some blaming a copyist, and A. H. Sayce proposing that a Babylonian script in which m and w are easily confused lay behind the double spelling. Whichever it was, the scene holds. An army comes through, a people is struck at Ham, and a nation of giants shrinks to one entry in a list of the defeated.

Later Jewish tradition gave them a pedigree the Bible never does. Genesis Rabbah, commenting on the giants of Genesis 6, says they were called by seven names, Emim, Rephaim, Gibborim, Zamzummim, Anakim, Avvim and Nephilim, and glosses each one. For the Zamzummim, Rabbi Yose bar Hanina reached for a Greek word and called them the greatest in war. The gloss quietly ties a displaced Transjordanian people to the sons of God and the daughters of men, and makes them survivors of the breed the flood was meant to finish. Louis Ginzberg gathered it into The Legends of the Jews, where the Zamzummim are named great masters in war.

What none of it supplies is a face. No skin, no beard, no armour, no house, no god, no grave. Their whole physical existence is a comparison with the Anakim, who are themselves mostly a comparison: the spies sent into Canaan came back saying that beside the sons of Anak they had looked like grasshoppers, even to themselves. Height stacked on height, with nothing underneath it.

Their strengths are those of a nation rather than a monster: numbers, stature, and possession of good upland country. The midrash adds ferocity. Scripture adds nothing further, and never once shows them fighting.

That silence is the point. Deuteronomy does not say the Ammonites defeated the Zamzummim. It says God wiped them out and the Ammonites moved in, which leaves the giants no battle in which they could even have lost. In this literature great size is never a defence; it marks a people about to be cleared. The weakness that outlasted them is permanent. They left no writing and no descendants to argue their case, so the record is one sentence set down by strangers about what the conquerors called them. The only word they left behind is a joke about how they sounded.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who were the Zamzummim?

The Zamzummim were a nation of giants who lived east of the Jordan, in the land later held by the Ammonites. Deuteronomy 2:20-21 describes them as a people great, numerous and as tall as the Anakim, and says God wiped them out so the Ammonites could dispossess them and settle in their place. They were counted among the Rephaim.

What does the name Zamzummim mean?

Zamzummim was the Ammonites’ name for these people, not their own. One explanation derives it from the Hebrew root zamam, to devise or plot, giving a sense like schemers. Another compares Arabic zamzama, to mutter or talk gibberish, which would make the Zamzummim the mumblers, named after how their language sounded to outsiders.

Are the Zamzummim the same as the Rephaim?

Deuteronomy says the Ammonite land was counted Rephaim country and that the Rephaim who lived there were called Zamzummim by the Ammonites. In the same passage the Rephaim of Moab are called Emim by the Moabites. The Zamzummim are therefore presented as the Ammonite-country branch of the Rephaim, whose last survivor, according to Deuteronomy, was Og of Bashan.

Are the Zamzummim the same as the Zuzim of Genesis?

The Zamzummim are often identified with the Zuzim, whom Chedorlaomer struck at Ham in Genesis 14:5, and Rashi states the identification outright. The Zuzim appear in the same sequence of peoples as Deuteronomy 2, in the position the Zamzummim occupy. Some modern scholars have explained the two spellings as a scribal slip, while others doubt the link.

What do Jewish legends say about the Zamzummim?

Genesis Rabbah lists Zamzummim among seven names given to the giants of Genesis 6, alongside Emim, Rephaim, Gibborim, Anakim, Avvim and Nephilim. Rabbi Yose bar Hanina explained the name as meaning the greatest in war. Louis Ginzberg included this tradition in The Legends of the Jews.

Related Entries

Rephaite, Anak, Nephilim, Grigori, Sheol, Giant, Gigantes, Titan, Jötunn, Cyclops, Antaeus