Zamzummim

The limestone country east of the Jordan rises in bare shelves toward the desert, and the wind that crosses it in summer is dry enough to split lips. People held that high ground before the Ammonites came. The Ammonites remembered them as giants, remembered them without affection, and the word they used for them was not the word those people used for themselves. Zamzummim. It is very nearly the only thing about them that survives.

Deuteronomy sets it down in a parenthesis. Moses is retracing the long approach to the Jordan, and the text keeps stopping to add antiquarian footnotes about who used to live where. Seir belonged to the Horites before the sons of Esau took it. Moab belonged to the Emim, a people great and many and tall as the Anakim. Ammon, the narrator adds, was likewise reckoned a land of Rephaim, and Rephaim lived there in former times, but the Ammonites call them Zamzummim. Then, in a single clause, they are finished. The Lord destroyed them, the Ammonites drove them out, and the Ammonites live there instead.

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

The notes are not idle. They sit inside an order forbidding Israel to touch Ammon, because that plateau was already assigned to the children of Lot, and the point being made is that the reshuffling of peoples across this landscape is old business and not an Israelite innovation. The giants are evidence in someone else’s argument. Their extinction is a precedent, cited the way a lawyer cites a case.

Then there is the name itself, which almost certainly began as an insult. The Hebrew consonants belong to a root meaning to plot or to devise, usually devising something bad, which yields a reading along the lines of schemers. The comparison most commentators reach for instead is Arabic, where the sound cluster carries the sense of a low confused noise at a distance, a rumble, a murmur, a hum with no words in it. Read that way the Zamzummim are the mumblers, the ones whose talk came across the valley as buzzing. It is what a foreign language sounds like to people who have decided not to learn it. Whatever these people called themselves, the surviving label is a mockery of the noise they made.

They were Rephaim, and the Rephaim collected names the way a coastline collects wrecks. Israelites called them Rephaim. Moabites called them Emim, which is close enough to the word for terrors to be doing obvious work. Ammonites called them Zamzummim. One people, three sets of neighbours, three verdicts. The Rephaim themselves lead a double life across the Hebrew Bible, appearing as enormous warrior-kings in the historical passages and as the powerless shades of the dead in the poetry, so that the same word covers both the tallest men who ever walked the Transjordan and the thin voices under the ground. Nobody has fully reconciled the two.

Genesis carries what may be an earlier glimpse of them. In the fourteenth year of the eastern kings’ campaign, Chedorlaomer and his allies came down the high road striking the old peoples of the region in sequence: Rephaim at Ashteroth-karnaim, Zuzim in Ham, Emim in Shaveh-kiriathaim. The list runs in roughly the order Deuteronomy uses, with Zuzim standing exactly where Zamzummim ought to be, and most readers since Rashi have treated the two names as one people. Some scholars are unconvinced and think the resemblance is doing more work than the evidence allows. Either way the moment is the same. Chariots on the eastern road, a season of methodical burning, and a giant nation reduced to one line in a casualty list.

Later Jewish tradition made more of them than the Bible does. A midrash on Genesis gathers seven names for the giants of the world before the flood, among them Emim, Rephaim, Gibborim, Anakim, Avvim, Nephilim and Zamzummim, and reads each name as a small judgement on what those beings were or did, the Zamzummim coming out as masters of war. That move quietly attaches them to the sons of God and the daughters of men, and turns a displaced Transjordanian people into a surviving branch of a corrupted stock that the flood was supposed to have settled. Louis Ginzberg collected the tradition, and it has been repeated ever since by writers who prefer their giants with a genealogy.

What none of it supplies is a face. There is no skin colour, no beard, no armour, no house, no god, no burial rite. Their whole physical existence in the record is a comparison, and the thing they are compared to is the Anakim, who are themselves mostly a comparison. Height stacked on height, with nothing underneath it. Whatever they wore and whatever they built, the archaeology of the Amman plateau has never been able to say this was theirs.

Their strengths are the strengths of a nation rather than a monster. Numbers, stature, and possession of good ground: the plateau above the Jabbok holds water and grazing, and holding it is the whole of what they are recorded as having done. The midrash adds ferocity, and the biblical text implies it by refusing to describe any battle at all.

That refusal is the point of them. Deuteronomy does not say the Ammonites defeated the Zamzummim. It says God destroyed them and the Ammonites moved in, which leaves the giants with no defeat they can be said to have fought. In this literature great size is never a defence; it is a marker on people about to be cleared. The deeper weakness came later and is permanent. They left no writing, no monument and no descendants to argue their case, so the record consists of two verses composed by strangers who heard the story from the people who took the land. The Ammonites are the only witnesses, and the only word they left behind is a joke about the noise.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who were the Zamzummim?

The Zamzummim were a nation of giants who lived in the Transjordanian highlands, in the territory later held by the Ammonites. Deuteronomy 2:20-21 describes them as a people great, numerous and as tall as the Anakim, and says the Ammonites drove them out and settled in their place. They were counted as a branch of the Rephaim.

What does the name Zamzummim mean?

Zamzummim was the Ammonite name for these people, not their own. The Hebrew root suggests plotting or scheming, while the more common explanation compares Arabic words for a distant, confused, wordless noise, giving a sense like murmurers or mumblers. Either way it appears to be a conqueror’s nickname rather than a genuine ethnonym.

Are the Zamzummim the same as the Rephaim?

Deuteronomy says the land of the Zamzummim was reckoned a land of Rephaim, so the Zamzummim are presented as a regional branch of that larger giant population. The same people are called Emim by the Moabites. Rephaim, Emim and Zamzummim are three names given by three different neighbours to what the text treats as one stock.

Are the Zamzummim the same as the Zuzim of Genesis?

Most readings identify them, including Rashi’s, because Genesis 14:5 lists the Zuzim in the same sequence of peoples that Deuteronomy 2 gives, in the position Zamzummim occupies. Some modern scholars think the identification rests on little more than the similar sound. No source settles the question.

What happened to the Zamzummim?

According to Deuteronomy the Lord destroyed them before the Ammonites, who dispossessed them and occupied their land. The text describes no battle and gives the Ammonites no military credit. Nothing of the Zamzummim survives beyond the name their conquerors used for them.

Related Entries

Rephaite, Anak, Nephilim, Grigori, Gog, Behemoth, Leviathan, Golem, Giant, Gigantes, Jötunn, Cyclops, Antaeus