{"it":{"id":"TX011","kind":"text","sub":"Hebrew","name":"Deuteronomy giants passages (2:10-11, 2:20-21, 3:11)","place":"St Petersburg","date":"c.7th-6th c. BCE","oldest":"4QDeut fragments; Leningrad Codex","inst":"Leningrad Codex B19a","lang":"Hebrew","src":[209,510],"lat":59.934,"lon":30.335,"tags":["Near East"],"sum":"Deuteronomy 3:11 says that Og, king of Bashan, was the last of the remnant of giants. Then it adds a detail: \"behold his bedstead was a bedstead of iron; is it not in Rabbath of the children of Ammon? nine cubits was the length thereof, and four cubits the breadth of it, after the cubit of a man.\"\n\nThe verse closes an account of war east of the Jordan. Moses tells how Israel took the cities of Og's kingdom, Salchah and Edrei and all of Bashan. The bed is offered almost as proof, as if readers could still go and look at it in Rabbath, the Ammonite city.\n\nWhat is hard to explain is why the writer cared about a bed. It gives no height for Og himself, only the size of the bedstead, and the cubit of a man was a forearm, so the length is an estimate. Iron was also a costly metal in that age.\n\nThe mainstream view is that the bed is a famous object or a story about one, used to show how great an enemy Israel defeated. Erich von Däniken goes further. In Chariots of the Gods he notes that the Bible speaks of giants and asks whether they were space travellers from another star.\n\nWhat would a bed nine cubits long have looked like to the people who saw it?","why":"Deuteronomy gives the size of a giant king's iron bed and says where to see it.","nfacts":0,"nsrc":2,"yt":"Convert nine cubits by different cubit lengths.","rel":["TX044","TX010"],"hook":"Deuteronomy says giant king Og slept on an iron bed nine cubits long."},"S":{"209":["www.biblegateway.com","https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Deuteronomy+3&version=KJV"],"510":["Wikipedia: Rephaite","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rephaite"]},"rec":{"id":"TX011","alias":[],"ms":[],"lab":[],"eng":[],"ori":[],"gaps":[],"dat":[],"aa":[{"id":"AA115","a":"Physical evidence of giant hybrids.","who":"Marzulli","main":"Antiquarian glosses; Rephaim are also shades of the dead (Ugaritic rpum); Og's 'bed' possibly a basalt sarcophagus/dolmen.","ms":"https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Deuteronomy+3&version=KJV","st":"unresolved","n":"interpretive claim; no measurable data","nl":1}],"ac":[],"me":[],"ci":[],"cq":[],"sd":[],"pas":[{"ref":"Deuteronomy 3:11","q":"Og's bedstead of iron, nine cubits by four. [paraphrase]","exact":"no","tr":"KJV","url":"https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Deuteronomy+3&version=KJV","mo":"giants"}],"tr":[],"mo":[],"tl":[],"wit":[],"tx":{"mainstream_reading":"Antiquarian glosses; Rephaim are also shades of the dead (Ugaritic rpum); Og's 'bed' possibly a basalt sarcophagus/dolmen.","alternative_reading":"Physical evidence of giant hybrids.","alt_proponent":"Marzulli","mistranslation_or_dispute":"'Iron' bed vs basalt, 'bed' vs coffin disputed.","key_theme":"Emim, Zamzummim, Anakim, Rephaim; Og's iron bed 9x4 cubits","language":"Hebrew","physical_object_institution":"Leningrad Codex B19a","composition_date":"c.7th-6th c. BCE","oldest_ms_date":"4QDeut fragments; Leningrad Codex","b":"V"},"sub":[],"src":[{"id":"S0744","t":"www.biblegateway.com","u":"https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Deuteronomy+3&version=KJV"},{"id":null,"t":"Wikipedia: Rephaite","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rephaite"},{"id":"VTX011-3","t":"Bible Gateway (KJV): Deuteronomy 3","u":"https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Deuteronomy%203&version=KJV"},{"id":"VTX011-4","t":"von Däniken, Chariots of the Gods? (Internet Archive)","u":"https://archive.org/details/chariotsofgods00vond"}],"qs":["What would a bed nine cubits long have looked like to the people who saw it?","Why point readers to a bed rather than to a body?"],"sum":"# Deuteronomy's Giants and the Iron Bed of Og\n\nIn 1918 the biblical scholar Gustav Dalman was walking the hills around Amman, the Jordanian capital that stands on the ruins of the ancient city of Rabbah of the Ammonites. Among the rocks he found a dolmen, a prehistoric tomb made of great stone slabs set upright and roofed with another. He measured it, and the numbers stopped him. The chamber matched, roughly, a measurement written down nearly three thousand years earlier in the Book of Deuteronomy: the length and breadth of the bed of a giant king named Og.\n\nThat a scholar could go looking for a bed from the Bible and come back with a stone tomb of about the right size says a great deal about this short, strange passage.\n\n## Three passages and a bed\n\nDeuteronomy is the fifth book of the Hebrew Bible, framed as the farewell speeches of Moses on the plains east of the Jordan. Most scholars date its composition to roughly the seventh and sixth centuries BCE, long after the events it describes. The oldest surviving pieces of it are fragments found among the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran. The oldest complete Hebrew copy is the Leningrad Codex, written in 1008 CE and kept today in the National Library of Russia in St Petersburg, which is why this record is placed there.\n\nIn the first chapters Moses looks back on forty years of wandering and the march toward Canaan. Three times the narrative pauses for what read like notes from an antiquarian. In chapter 2, verses 10 and 11, the land of Moab is said to have once held the Emims, \"a people great, and many, and tall, as the Anakims; which also were accounted giants.\" A few verses later, in 2:20 and 2:21, the land of Ammon gets the same treatment: \"That also was accounted a land of giants: giants dwelt therein in old time; and the Ammonites call them Zamzummims.\"\n\nThen, in chapter 3, the story turns to war. Israel goes up the road to Bashan, the fertile high plateau east of the Sea of Galilee, and Og its king comes out to fight at Edrei. He loses. The text says Israel took sixty cities, \"fenced with high walls, gates, and bars,\" and destroyed everyone in them. And then comes verse 11, the strangest sentence in the chapter:\n\n\"For only Og king of Bashan remained of the remnant of giants; behold his bedstead was a bedstead of iron; is it not in Rabbath of the children of Ammon? nine cubits was the length thereof, and four cubits the breadth of it, after the cubit of a man.\"\n\n## What nine cubits means\n\nA cubit was the length of a man's forearm, from elbow to fingertip, usually reckoned at about eighteen inches. Nine cubits by four comes to roughly thirteen and a half feet by six, or about 4.1 by 1.8 metres. If it was built to fit its owner the way beds usually are, Og would have stood somewhere between nine and thirteen feet. The phrase \"after the cubit of a man\" seems designed to rule out cheating: this is an ordinary forearm, not some royal measure. Later rabbinic tradition went the other way and said the bed was measured in Og's own cubits, which would make him larger still.\n\nNotice what the writer does not say. There is no height for Og himself, no description of his face or his weapons, nothing like the detailed armour given later for Goliath. The only proof offered is a piece of furniture, and the reader is told where it sits. Is it not in Rabbath? The question is rhetorical. It assumes the bed was still there, a known object in a known city, something a traveller could see with his own eyes.\n\n## The other meaning of Rephaim\n\nThe word Deuteronomy uses for Og's people is Rephaim, usually translated as giants. But the same Hebrew word appears elsewhere in the Bible with a very different meaning. In Isaiah 26:14, in Psalm 88 and in Proverbs 9:18, the Rephaim are the shades of the dead, the weak spirits who live in Sheol, the underworld.\n\nThat double meaning has a much older root. On the Syrian coast, the city of Ugarit has given up clay tablets from the thirteenth century BCE that speak of the rpum, deified ancestors, the honoured royal dead. One tablet, known to specialists as KTU 1.108, calls on a figure named Rapiu, \"King of Eternity,\" and describes him as \"the god enthroned in Ashtarat, the god who rules in Edrei.\" Those are the very two cities the Bible names as Og's royal seats. The scholar Matthew McAffee argues that the Hebrew Bible has probably kept a genuinely ancient memory of an Amorite king Og from the second millennium BCE, and that calling him one of the Rephaim reflects an old belief that gave special status to dead kings.\n\nSo the mainstream reading, set out in the record's own notes, is this. The giant passages in Deuteronomy are antiquarian glosses, added to explain who lived in the land before. The Rephaim may have begun as ancestral spirits and been turned, by later writers, into a race of physical giants. Og's bed may be a memory of a real and famous object. Some scholars suggest it was a coffin rather than a bed, and that \"iron\" describes the dark basalt stone of the region rather than worked metal; both readings are disputed. Michael Heiser connected the bed to the sacred marriage bed of the Babylonian god Marduk, which would make its size symbolic rather than a measurement of a body. Francesca Stavrakopoulou and others argue that Og's kingdom was at first a realm of the dead. The evidence for any of these is inconclusive.\n\n## The land of the dolmens\n\nHere the ground itself joins the argument. The region north of the river Jabbok, ancient Bashan, the land the Bible calls \"the land of Rephaim,\" holds hundreds of megalithic stone tombs, dolmens built between the fifth and third millennia BCE. Such tombs are rare west of the Jordan. The only other notable cluster sits in the hills of Judah near Hebron, the place where Numbers says the giant sons of Anak lived.\n\nThat pattern is hard to wave away. The two areas the Bible links most closely with giants are also the two areas filled with enormous ancient stone graves, already thousands of years old when Deuteronomy was written. People in the Iron Age walked among those slabs, too heavy for one man to move, and asked who had raised them. One answer was a vanished race of big men, and the clearest proof of their size was a stone chamber long enough to lie down in. Dalman's dolmen near Amman fits that story almost too well.\n\n## The giant who would not stay small\n\nLater writers would not let Og go. The Talmud tells how he tore up a mountain to crush the Israelite camp and how Moses leapt ten cubits to strike his ankle. The prophet Amos may mean him when he speaks of \"the Amorite, whose height was like the height of the cedars.\" Islamic folklore remembers him as 'Uj ibn 'Anaq, a giant who stood knee deep in the ocean and roasted whales. In the twentieth century Erich von Däniken, in Chariots of the Gods, pointed to the Bible's giants and asked whether they might have come from somewhere other than the earth.\n\nStrip all of that away and the oldest layer is still odd. A text that rarely bothers with measurements gives exact dimensions for one object. It names the city where the object sat. And it is backed, in the landscape, by real tombs of real size in exactly the regions it names, built by people whose names nobody remembered.\n\nWhat did the people of Rabbah believe they were looking at when they showed visitors the iron bed of the last giant?"},"img":null,"md":{"h":"img/m/TX011-16x9.webp","w":1600,"hh":900,"alt":"A small dolmen, a flat stone slab resting on upright stones, in dry grass at Gamla in the Golan Heights","by":"Hanay","lic":"CC BY-SA 3.0","lu":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0","p":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gamla_Nature_reserve_(33).JPG","g":false,"ct":false,"cap":"","sec":[]},"hh":[{"v":"c.7th-6th c. BCE","h":"Date","s":[283]},{"v":"Hebrew","h":"Language","s":[283]},{"v":"Leningrad Codex B19a","h":"Where the physical copy is held","s":[283]}],"hs":{"283":["www.biblegateway.com","https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Deuteronomy+3&version=KJV"]}}