{"it":{"id":"TX044","kind":"text","sub":"Ugaritic/Hebrew","name":"Rephaim (Ugaritic rpum texts KTU 1.20-1.22; Deut 3:11; Isa 26:14)","place":"St Petersburg","date":"c.13th c. BCE (Ugarit); 7th-6th c. BCE (Hebrew)","oldest":"as above","inst":"Ugarit tablets; Leningrad Codex","lang":"Ugaritic/Hebrew","src":[242,510,600],"lat":59.934,"lon":30.335,"tags":["Near East"],"sum":"The Bible says Og, last of the Rephaim, had an iron bed nine cubits long, about 4 m.","why":"It is a biblical giant whose name also means 'the dead', and a bed the text says you could go and see.","nfacts":0,"nsrc":3,"yt":"Read KTU 1.20–1.22.","rel":["TX011"],"hook":"Deuteronomy says Og's iron bed could still be seen at Rabbah: nine cubits long and four wide."},"S":{"242":["en.wikipedia.org","https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/summary/Rephaite"],"510":["Wikipedia: Rephaite","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rephaite"],"600":["Deuteronomy 3:11 (KJV, BibleGateway)","https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Deuteronomy%203%3A11&version=KJV"]},"rec":{"id":"TX044","alias":[],"ms":[],"lab":[],"eng":[],"ori":[],"gaps":[],"dat":[],"aa":[{"id":"AA144","a":"Real race of giants.","who":"Marzulli","main":"The term means deified dead ancestors in Ugarit and Isaiah, and giants only in Deuteronomy's antiquarian notes.","ms":"https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/summary/Rephaite","st":"unresolved","n":"interpretive claim; no measurable data","nl":1}],"ac":[],"me":[],"ci":[],"cq":[],"sd":[],"pas":[],"tr":[],"mo":[{"v":"giants_hybrids","ev":"Rephaim","n":"Levant","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/summary/Rephaite"}],"tl":[],"wit":[],"tx":{"mainstream_reading":"The term means deified dead ancestors in Ugarit and Isaiah, and giants only in Deuteronomy's antiquarian notes.","alternative_reading":"Real race of giants.","alt_proponent":"Marzulli","mistranslation_or_dispute":"Dual meaning is the key dispute.","key_theme":"Rephaim as giant people or as shades of the dead","language":"Ugaritic/Hebrew","physical_object_institution":"Ugarit tablets; Leningrad Codex","composition_date":"c.13th c. BCE (Ugarit); 7th-6th c. BCE (Hebrew)","oldest_ms_date":"as above","b":"V"},"sub":[],"src":[{"id":"S0094","t":"en.wikipedia.org","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/summary/Rephaite"},{"id":null,"t":"Wikipedia: Rephaite","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rephaite"},{"id":"S2601","t":"Deuteronomy 3:11 (KJV, BibleGateway)","u":"https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Deuteronomy%203%3A11&version=KJV"},{"id":"VTX044-4","t":"Sefaria: Deuteronomy 3:11","u":"https://www.sefaria.org/Deuteronomy.3.11"},{"id":"VTX044-5","t":"Sefaria: Isaiah 26:14","u":"https://www.sefaria.org/Isaiah.26.14"},{"id":"VTX044-6","t":"Wikipedia: Og","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Og"}],"sum":"# The Rephaim: Giants, Ghosts and King Og's Iron Bed\n\n\"Only King Og of Bashan was left of the remaining Rephaim. His bedstead, an iron bedstead, is now in Rabbah of the Ammonites; it is nine cubits long and four cubits wide, by the standard cubit!\"\n\nThe line comes in the middle of a war story. In the third chapter of Deuteronomy, Moses recalls how the Israelites marched toward Bashan, east of the Jordan, and how Og, its king, came out against them at Edrei. They took sixty fortified towns, \"fortified with high walls, gates, and bars.\" Then the narrator stops to point at a piece of furniture, as if the reader could go and look. The bed, by an ordinary cubit, would be about 4 metres long and 1.8 metres wide. Rabbah of the Ammonites is the ancient city on which modern Amman, the capital of Jordan, now stands.\n\nThe word that makes Og famous is Rephaim. In some books of the Hebrew Bible it means a race of giants. In others it means the dead.\n\n## A people of great height\n\nIn the books of Genesis, Deuteronomy and Joshua, the Rephaim are an ancient people of Canaan, listed among the nations whose land was promised to Abraham's descendants. Genesis says the king Chedorlaomer defeated them at Ashteroth Karnaim. Deuteronomy adds a note of ethnography: the Moabites called them Emim, and the Ammonites called them Zamzummim. Anak, too, is counted among them. Og is named as the last of them, and the region of Bashan he ruled is called \"Rephaim country.\"\n\nOg's defeat became a celebrated victory, recalled in the Psalms. The prophet Amos may refer to him as \"the Amorite\" whose height was like the cedars. Later tradition made him larger still. The Talmud says he tried to destroy the Israelite camp by uprooting a mountain to throw on it, and that God sent a swarm of ants to dig away the centre of the mountain while it rested on Og's head. In Islamic legend he appears as the giant ʿUj ibn ʿAnaq, though he is not mentioned in the Quran or the canonical hadith.\n\n## Shades of the dead\n\nYet the same Hebrew word is used very differently in other books. In Isaiah, the Rephaim are the dead in the underworld. The Jewish Publication Society translation of Isaiah 26:14 reads: \"They are dead, they can never live; Shades, they can never rise.\" Psalms, Proverbs and Job use the word the same way, for the spirits in Sheol. Modern translations usually separate the two meanings, giants in one place and shades in another, but the original text uses the same word for both.\n\nThe older background is found at Ugarit, the Late Bronze Age city on the Syrian coast. There, a related word, rapiʾuma, names semi-divine ancestors. A group of three fragmentary tablets known as the Rephaim texts, catalogued as KTU 1.20 to 1.22 and first published by Charles Virolleaud in 1936 and 1941, describes the Rephaim invited to a house, travelling by chariot for three days to a threshing floor, and feasting for seven days. Scholars have read them as deified ancestors, minor gods, spirits of the underworld, or human cult figures connected with fertility. Most attribute the tablets to Ilimilku, the scribe of the Baal Cycle.\n\nA funerary text from Ugarit, examined in a 1989 study by the scholar Lewis, shows the rapiʾuma, the long dead, invoked together with recently dead kings in a royal funeral liturgy, given food and drink, and asked to bless the reign of the living king. The end of the Baal Cycle addresses the sun goddess in the same terms: \"Sun rules the Rephaim, Sun rules the divine ones.\"\n\nAnother Ugaritic tablet, KTU 1.108, from the thirteenth century BCE, links the root of the word with kingship and with place names that probably correspond to Ashtaroth and Edrei, the very towns from which the Bible says Og ruled. The scholar Matthew McAffee argues from this that the Bible probably preserves a genuinely ancient tradition of an Amorite king Og from the second millennium BCE, and that calling him one of the Rephaim reflects an old belief that gave such status to dead kings.\n\n## Two readings, and a middle way\n\nSo which came first, the giants or the ghosts? Francesca Stavrakopoulou and Baruch Margulis argue that Og's kingdom was originally one of departed shades. Laura Quick suggests a middle course: biblical writers may have reworked older ancestral myths, turning Og from an underworld figure into the last of a race of physical giants. She grants that the evidence for either view is inconclusive. Meanwhile one recent study, by Jonathan Yogev, argues that the Rephaim were systematically removed from biblical texts to erase their memory.\n\nReaders who take the passage literally, such as the writer L. A. Marzulli, see in it eyewitness detail of a real race of giants. That is interpretation; there is no measurable data behind it. The main scholarly view is that the word meant deified dead ancestors at Ugarit and in Isaiah, and giants mainly in Deuteronomy's antiquarian notes.\n\n## What was at Rabbah?\n\nSome translations render Og's \"bedstead\" as a sarcophagus. The region of Bashan, north of the river Jabbok, holds hundreds of megalithic stone tombs, dolmens, dating from the fifth to the third millennium BCE. In 1918 the scholar Gustav Dalman found a notable dolmen near Amman that matched the approximate dimensions of the bed.\n\nThat does not settle what the writers of Deuteronomy saw, or whether they saw anything at all. But it suggests how a story could attach itself to a landscape. The word Rephaim already joined the ancient dead and the mighty kings of the past. In a country full of stone tombs too large for ordinary people, it is not hard to see how one of them could become a giant's bed.\n\nPicture the scene the verse invites: a traveller in Rabbah, shown a long slab of stone or iron in the shadow of the city, and told that this is where the last of the giants once lay down.","qs":["Deuteronomy points to Og's iron bed, about 4 m long, as something you could still go and see. What were the writers actually looking at?","The same word means \"giants\" and \"spirits of the dead\". How did the memory of a people become the memory of ghosts, or the other way round?"]},"img":null,"md":{"h":"img/m/TX044-16x9.webp","w":1600,"hh":900,"alt":"Stone ruins at Ras Shamra, the site of ancient Ugarit, Syria","by":"Loris Romito","lic":"CC BY-SA 3.0","lu":"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/","p":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ugarit_02.jpg","g":false,"ct":false,"cap":"The site of Ugarit (Ras Shamra, Syria), where the tablets were found","sec":[]},"hh":[{"v":"as above","h":"Oldest surviving copy","s":[321]},{"v":"Ugaritic/Hebrew","h":"Language","s":[321]},{"v":"Ugarit tablets","h":"Where the physical copy is held: Ugarit tablets; Leningrad Codex","s":[321]}],"hs":{"321":["en.wikipedia.org","https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/summary/Rephaite"]}}