11 (For only Og king of Bashan remained of the remnant of the Rephaim; behold, his bedstead was a bedstead of iron; isn't it in Rabbah of the children of Ammon? nine cubits was its length, and four cubits its breadth, after the cubit of a man.)
*Minor differences ignored. Grouped by changes, with first version listed as example.
Giants - Or Rephaim: see the marginal reference note.
A bedstead of iron - The "iron" was probably the black basalt of the country, which not only contains a large proportion, about 20 percent, of iron, but was actually called "iron," and is still so regarded by the Arabians. Iron was indeed both known and used, principally for tools (see e. g. Deuteronomy 19:5 and compare Genesis 4:22 note), at the date in question by the Semitic people of Palestine and the adjoining countries; but bronze was the ordinary metal of which weapons, articles of furniture, etc., were made.
The word translated "bedstead" is derived from a root signifying "to unite" or "bind together," and so "to arch" or "cover with a vault." The word may then certainly mean "bier," and perhaps does so in this passage. Modern travelers have discovered in the territories of Og sarcophagi as well as many other articles made of the black basalt of the country.
Is it not in Rabbath of the children of Ammon? - Probably after the defeat and death of Og at Edrei the remnant of his army fled into the territory of the friendly Ammonites, and carried with them the corpse of the giant king.
After the cubit of a man - i. e. after the usual and ordinary cubit, counted as people are accustomed to count. Taking 18 inches to the cubit, the bedstead or sarcophagus would thus be from thirteen to fourteen feet long.
Og king of Bashan remained - Og was the last king of the Amorites; his kingdom appears to have taken its name from the hill of Bashan; the country has been since called Batanaea.
Remnant of giants - Of the Rephaim. See on Deuteronomy 2:10 (note), Deuteronomy 2:11 (note).
His bedstead was - of iron - Iron was probably used partly for its strength and durability, and partly to prevent noxious vermin from harbouring in it.
Is it not in Rabbath, of the children of Ammon? - The bedstead was probably taken in some battle between the Ammonites and Amorites, in which the former had gained the victory. The bedstead was carried a trophy and placed in Rabbath, which appears, from 2-Samuel 12:26, to have been the royal city of the children of Ammon.
Nine cubits was the length - four cubits the breadth - Allowing the bedstead to have been one cubit longer than Og, which is certainly sufficient, and allowing the cubit to be about eighteen inches long, for this is perhaps the average of the cubit of a man, then Og was twelve feet high. This may be deemed extraordinary, and perhaps almost incredible, and therefore many commentators have, according to their fancy, lengthened the bedstead and shortened the man, making the former one-third longer than the person who lay on it, that they might reduce Og to six cubits; but even in this way they make him at least nine feet high.
On this subject the rabbins have trifled most sinfully. I shall give one specimen. In the Targum of Jonathan ben Uzziel on Numbers 21:33-35, it is said that "Og having observed that the camp of the Israelites extended six miles, he went and tore up a mountain six miles in its base, and put it on his head, and carried it towards the camp, that he might throw it on the Israelites and destroy them; but the word of the Lord prepared a worm, which bored a hole in the mountain over his head, so that it fell down upon his shoulders: at the same time his teeth growing out in all directions, stuck into the mountain, so that he could not cast it off his head. Moses, (who was himself ten cubits high), seeing Og thus entangled, took an axe ten cubits long, and having leaped ten cubits in height, struck Og on the ankle bone, so that he fell and was slain."
From this account the distance from the sole of Og's foot to his ankle was thirty cubits in length! I give this as a very slight specimen of rabbinical comment. I could quote places in the Talmud in which Og is stated to be several miles high! This relation about Og I suppose to be also an historical note added by a subsequent hand.
For only Og king of Bashan remained of the remnant of giants; behold, his (d) 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.
(d) The more terrible this giant was, the greater reason they had to glorify God for the victory.
For only Og king of Bashan remained of the remnant of giants,.... The meaning seems to be, either that he was the only one that was left of the race of the giants the Ammonites found when they took possession of this country, Deuteronomy 2:20 or that was left when the Amorites took it from the Ammonites; and who having by some means or other ingratiated himself into their affections, because of his stature, strength, and courage, and other qualifications they might discern in him, made him their king:
behold, his bedstead was a bedstead of iron: his body being so large and bulky, he might think it most proper and safest for him to have a bedstead made of iron to lie upon, or to prevent noxious insects harbouring in it; nor was it unusual to have bedsteads made of other materials than wood, as of gold, silver, and ivory; See Gill on Amos 6:4. Some learned men (r) have been of opinion, that the beds of Typho in Syria, made mention of by Homer (s), refer to this bedstead of Og:
is it not in Rabbath of the children of Ammon? which was the royal city of the Ammonites, in the times of David, 2-Samuel 12:26, now called Philadelphia, as Jerom says (t). This bedstead might be either sent thither by Og, before the battle at Edrei, for safety, or rather might be sold by the Israelites to the inhabitants of Rabbath, who kept it, as a great curiosity:
nine cubits was the length thereof, and four cubits the breadth of it, after the cubit of a man; a common cubit, so that it was four yards and a half long, and two yards broad. Onkelos renders it, after the king's cubit; and the king's cubit at Babylon, according to Herodotus (u), was larger by three fingers than the common one; such as the cubit in Ezekiel 40:5, which was a cubit and an hand's breadth; and this makes the dimensions of the bedstead yet larger. And by this judgment may be made of the tallness of Og's stature, though this is not always a sure rule to go by; for Alexander, when in India, ordered his soldiers to make beds of five cubits long, to be left behind them, that they might be thought to be larger men than they were, as Diodorus Siculus (w) and Curtius (x) relate; but there is little reason to believe that Og's bedstead was made with such a view. Maimonides observes (y), that a bed in common is a third part larger than a man; so that Og, according to this way of reckoning, was six cubits high, and his stature doubly larger than a common man's; but less than a third part may well be allowed to a bed, which will make him taller still; the height of Og is reckoned by Wolfius (z) to be about thirteen feet eleven inches of Paris measure.
(r) Vid. Dickinson. Delph. Phaenieizant. c. 2. p. 12. (s) Iliad. z. (t) De loc. Hebrews. fol. 94. C. (u) Clio, sive, l. 1. c. 175. (w) Bibliothec. l. 17. p. 563. (x) Hist. l. 9. c. 3. (y) Moreh Nevochim, par. 2. c. 47. p. 325. (z) Apud Scheuchzer. Physic. Sacr. vol. 3. p. 401.
only Og king of Bashan remained of the remnant of giants--literally, "of Rephaim." He was not the last giant, but the only living remnant in the trans-jordanic country (Joshua 15:14), of a certain gigantic race, supposed to be the most ancient inhabitants of Palestine.
behold, his bedstead was a bedstead of iron--Although beds in the East are with the common people nothing more than a simple mattress, bedsteads are not unknown. They are in use among the great, who prefer them of iron or other metals, not only for strength and durability, but for the prevention of the troublesome insects which in warm climates commonly infest wood. Taking the cubit at half a yard, the bedstead of Og would measure thirteen and a half feet, so that as beds are usually a little larger than the persons who occupy them, the stature of the Amorite king may be estimated at about eleven or twelve feet; or he might have caused his bed to be made much larger than was necessary, as Alexander the Great did for each of his foot soldiers, to impress the Indians with an idea of the extraordinary strength and stature of his men [LE CLERC]. But how did Og's bedstead come to be in Rabbath, of the children of Ammon? In answer to this question, it has been said, that Og had, on the eve of engagement, conveyed it to Rabbath for safety. Or it may be that Moses, after capturing it, may have sold it to the Ammonites, who had kept it as an antiquarian curiosity till their capital was sacked in the time of David. This is a most unlikely supposition, and besides renders it necessary to consider the latter clause of this verse as an interpolation inserted long after the time of Moses. To avoid this, some eminent critics take the Hebrew word rendered "bedstead" to mean "coffin." They think that the king of Bashan having been wounded in battle, fled to Rabbath, where he died and was buried; hence the dimensions of his "coffin" are given [DATHE, ROOS].
Even in Abraham's time, the giant tribe of Rephaim was living in Bashan (Genesis 14:5). But out of the remnant of these, king Og, whom the Israelites defeated and slew, was the only one left. For the purpose of recalling the greatness of the grace of God that had been manifested in that victory, and not merely to establish the credibility of the statements concerning the size of Og ("just as things belonging to an age that has long passed away are shown to be credible by their remains," Spinoza, etc.), Moses points to the iron bed of this king, which was still in Rabbath-Ammon, and was nine cubits long and four broad, "after the cubit of a man," i.e., the ordinary cubit in common use (see the analogous expression, "a man's pen," Isaiah 8:1). הלה, for הלא, synonymous with הנּה. There is nothing to amaze is in the size of the bed or bedstead given here. The ordinary Hebrew cubit was only a foot and a half, probably only eighteen Dresden inches (see my Archologie, ii. p. 126, Anm. 4). Now a bed is always larger than the man who sleeps in it. But in this case Clericus fancies that Og "intentionally exceeded the necessary size, in order that posterity might be led to draw more magnificent conclusions from the size of the bed, as to the stature of the man who was accustomed to sleep in it." He also refers to the analogous case of Alexander the Great, of whom Diod. Sic. (xvii. 95) affirms, that whenever he was obliged to halt on his march to India, he made colossal arrangements of all kinds, causing, among other things, two couches to be prepared in the tents for every foot-soldier, each five cubits long, and two stalls for every horseman, twice as large as the ordinary size, "to represent a camp of heroes, and leave striking memorials behind for the inhabitants of the land, of gigantic men and their supernatural strength." With a similar intention Og may also have left behind him a gigantic bed as a memorial of his superhuman greatness, on the occasion of some expedition of his against the Ammonites; and this bed may have been preserved in their capital as a proof of the greatness of their foe.
(Note: "It will often be found, that very tall people are disposed to make themselves appear even taller than they actually are" (Hengstenberg, Diss. ii. p. 201). Moreover, there are still giants who are eight feet high and upwards. "According to the N. Preuss. Zeit. of 1857, there came a man to Berlin 8 feet 4 inches high, and possibly still growing, as he was only twenty years old; and he was said to have a great-uncle who was nine inches taller" (Schultz).)
Moses might then refer to this gigantic bed of Og, which was known to the Israelites; and there is no reason for resorting to the improbable conjecture, that the Ammonites had taken possession of a bed of king Og upon some expedition against the Amorites, and had carried it off as a trophy to their capital.
(Note: There is still less probability in the conjecture of J. D. Michaelis, Vater, Winer, and others, that Og's iron bed was a sarcophagus of basalt, such as are still frequently met with in those regions, as much as 9 feet long and 3 1/2 feet broad, or even as much as 12 feet long and 6 feet in breadth and height (vid., Burckhardt, pp. 220, 246; Robinson, iii. p. 385; Seetzen, i. pp. 355, 360); and the still further assumption, that the corpse of the fallen king was taken to Rabbah, and there interred in a royal way, is altogether improbable.)
"Rabbath of the sons of Ammon," or briefly Rabbah, i.e., the great (Joshua 13:25; 2-Samuel 11:1), was the capital of the Ammonites, afterwards called Philadelphia, probably from Ptolemaeus Philadelphus; by Polybius, Ῥαββατάμανα; by Abulfeda, Ammn, which is the name still given to the uninhabited ruins on the Nahr Ammn, i.e., the upper Jabbok (see Burckhardt, pp. 612ff. and v. Raumer, Pal. p. 268).
In Rabbath - Where it might now be, either because the Ammonites in some former battle with Og, had taken it as a spoil: or because after Og's death, the Ammonites desired to have this monument of his greatness, and the Israelites permitted them to carry it away to their chief city. Nine cubits - So his bed was four yards and an half long, and two yards broad.
*More commentary available at chapter level.