1“And we turned and we went up on the way to the Bashan, and Og king of Bashan sallied forth to meet us in battle, he and all his troops, at Edrei. 2And the LORD said to me, ‘Do not fear him, for into your hand I have given him and all his troops and his land, and you shall do to him as you did to Sihon the Amorite king who dwells in Heshbon.’ 3And the LORD our God gave into our hand Og king of the Bashan, too, and all his troops, and we struck him down until no remnant was left. 4And we captured all his towns at that time. There was not a city that we did not take from them, sixty towns, all the district of Argob, the kingdom of Og in the Bashan. 5All these were fortified towns with high walls, double gates, and bolt, besides the very many open towns. 6And we put them under the ban as we had done to Sihon king of Heshbon, putting under the ban every town, menfolk, the women, and the little ones. 7But all the beasts and the booty of the towns we plundered for ourselves. 8And we took the land at that time from the hand of the two Amorite kings who were across the Jordan, from the Wadi Arnon as far as Mount Hermon. 9The Sidonians call Hermon Sirion, and the Amorites call it Senir. 10All the towns of the plateau and all the Gilead and all the Bashan as far as Salcah and Edrei, the towns of the kingdom of Og in the Bashan. 11For only Og king of the Bashan remained from the rest of the Rephaim. Look, his bedstead, an iron bedstead, is it not in Rabbah of the Ammonites? Nine cubits its length and four cubits its width by the cubit of a man. 12And this land we took hold of at that time. From Aroer which is on the Wadi Arnon and half the high country of the Gilead and its towns, I gave to the Reubenite and to the Gadite. 13And the rest of the Gilead and all of the Bashan, the kingdom of Og, I gave to the half-tribe of Manasseh—all the district of Argob. All of that Bashan is called Land of the Rephaim. 14Jair son of Manasseh took all the district of Argob as far as the border of the Geshurite and the Maacathites, and he called them—the Bashan—after his own name, Jair’s Hamlets, until this day. 15And to Machir I gave the Gilead. 16And to the Reubenite and to the Gadite I gave from the Gilead as far as Wadi Arnon, with the middle of the wadi the boundary, as far as Wadi Jabbok, the boundary of the Ammonites, 17and the Arabah with the Jordan the boundary, from Chinnereth as far as the Arabah Sea, the Dead Sea, beneath the slopes of Pisgah to the east. 18And I charged you at that time, saying, ‘The LORD your God has given you this land to take hold of it. As vanguard troops you shall cross over before your brothers the Israelites, all the warriors. 19Only your wives and your little ones and your livestock—I know you have much livestock—shall stay in your towns that I have given to you, 20until the LORD your God grants repose to your brothers as to you, and they, too, take hold of the land that the LORD your God is about to give to them across the Jordan. Then you may go back, each man to his inheritance that I have given to you.’ 21And I charged Joshua at that time, saying, ‘Your own eyes have seen all that the LORD your God did to these two kings. So shall the LORD do to all the kingdoms into which you are about to cross. 22You shall not fear them, for it is the LORD your God Who does battle for you.’
23“And I pleaded with the LORD at that time, saying, 24‘My Master, LORD, You Yourself have begun to show Your servant Your greatness and Your strong hand, for what god is there in the heavens and on the earth who could do like Your deeds and like Your might? 25Let me, pray, cross over that I may see the goodly land which is across the Jordan, this goodly high country the Lebanon.’ 26And the LORD was cross with me because of you, and He did not listen to me. And the LORD said to me, ‘Enough for you! Do not speak more to Me of this matter. 27Go up to the top of the Pisgah, and raise your eyes to the west and to the north and to the south and to the east and see with your own eyes, for you shall not cross this Jordan. 28And charge Joshua and strengthen him and bid him take heart, for he shall cross over before this people and he shall give them in estate the land that you will see.’ 29And we stayed in the valley over against Beth Peor.”
CHAPTER 3 NOTES
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2. Do not fear him, for . . . you shall do to him as you did to Sihon. Although Moses has already prevailed over Sihon, he has special reason to be afraid of Og, for, as we learn in verse 11, Og, alone among these trans-Jordanian kings, is a gigantic figure, the last scion of a legendary race.
5. fortified towns with high walls, double gates and bolt. The looming aspect of the trans-Jordanian towns, which was stressed before, is here given architectural specification: despite the high walls and the firmly bolted gates, the Israelites found ways to breach the defenses and capture every one of the enemies’ towns. These passages might well be a wishful turning around of the strategic telescope, for in the period in which they were composed—the last century of the First Commonwealth—it was the towns of Israel and Judah that repeatedly faced assault and sometimes succumbed.
open towns. That is, without walls or other fortifications.
8. as far as Mount Hermon. Repeatedly in these rehearsals of the Israelite conquest, the eye of the narrator—Moses—swings in a grand panorama from trans-Jordan, where he and the people are standing and where the first victories took place, across the Jordan, and all the way to the fertile mountainous region in the north of Canaan. The lushness of the Mount Hermon region is attested by its invocation in erotic contexts in the Song of Songs.
11. For only Og king of the Bashan remained from the rest of the Rephaim. Since the Rephaim, as we had occasion to note in 2:10, are a race of giants, and also dwellers of the underworld, this makes Og virtually a mythological figure. In a Phoenician mortuary inscription from the sixth or fifth century B.C.E., would-be violators of the tomb are warned that the great Og will exact retribution from them. He would appear to be some sort of fierce underworld god or demon in the common lore of the region, and our text seeks to historicize him while clinging to his legendary lineaments. Because of the link between the Rephaim and the Nephilim of Genesis 6:4, several traditional commentators see Og as the last of the antediluvians.
his bedstead, an iron bedstead. The Hebrew noun ʿeres is a poetic term for bed, perhaps used here (instead of the more prosaic mishkav or mitah) to give this declaration an epic flourish. Moshe Weinfeld proposes that it means “bier,” a secondary meaning that mitah has. Several scholars have noted that late in the second millennium B.C.E., iron had been only recently introduced and was still regarded as a rare metal. But the sheer hardness of the substance might be meant to indicate the martial toughness of the gigantic king.
is it not in Rabbah of the Ammonites? The speaker points to this relic of the gargantuan Og as concrete evidence of his actual existence, available for inspection by the curious tourist.
by the cubit of a man. The disproportion between the giant and an ordinary man is highlighted by giving the measurements of his bed according to “the cubit of a man,” that is, the length in an average man from the elbow to the beginning of the knuckles. (The royal cubit was longer.) This would make the bedstead around thirteen and a half feet long and approximately as wide as a modern queen-size bed (in an era when all beds were single couches).
12. And this land we took hold of at that time. One of the earmarks of the Deuteronomic style is the fondness it exhibits for demonstrative pronouns. Moses, recapitulating the recent history of the Israelites for the benefit of the people, likes to use what linguists call deictics—“pointing words”—to indicate what is before their eyes, the familiar objects of their collective experience.
14. until this day. This little flourish is an inadvertent hint that for the moment the writer is probably not thinking of Moses’s time but of his own.
17. the Arabah Sea, the Dead Sea. The latter designation in the Hebrew is literally the Salt Sea.
Pisgah. The other name for this mountain, from whose peak Moses will look out on the promised land and then die, is Nebo.
19. Only your wives and your little ones and your livestock. Most of the details here of the military role assigned to the trans-Jordanian tribes correspond to the account in Numbers 32, though this version is a good deal more succinct and omits the indications of divine instruction in Numbers.
22. it is the LORD your God Who does battle for you. This clause, picked up from Exodus 14:14, serves as a kind of refrain through this whole narrative of the conquest.
23. I pleaded. Richard Elliott Friedman, noting the linkage between this verb and “did not listen” in verse 26, interestingly detects an allusion to Genesis 42:21, where Joseph’s brothers recall how he pleaded to them and they did not listen when they sold him into slavery. Perhaps the point of the allusion is that it recalls the moment when Joseph is violently thrust away from his homeland of Canaan: Moses, who began where Joseph ended, in Egypt, will not be permitted to enter the homeland though, as we may recall, Joseph’s bones will be carried into the promised land to be buried there.
24. My Master, LORD. The Hebrew, as it is vocalized in the Masoretic Text, reads ʾadonai YHWH, the first of these two words being another appellation of God. This translation follows Weinfeld’s persuasive suggestion that either the original vocalization of the first word was ʾadoni, “my Master,” a form of address often used in supplications, or that the plural suffix ʾadonai is a plural of majesty.
for what god is there in the heavens and on the earth. Given the Deuteronomist’s rigorous monotheism, the plausible sense of these words is that the supposed gods of heaven and earth have no real substance and therefore no power to perform any acts. Nevertheless, the formulation, perhaps as a kind of verbal fossil, carries a trace of the older view that there may be other gods, but ones that are no match for YHWH.
25. this goodly high country. Still again one sees the Deuteronomist’s fondness for the demonstrative pronoun, here used with considerable poignancy as Moses points verbally to the sweet land before him that he will not be allowed to enter.
26. And the LORD was cross. Although the verb used in this translation—as by Friedman—is a little too mild for the Hebrew hitʿaber, which is closer to “was angered,” it has the virtue of preserving the pun, transparent in the Hebrew, on the same verb (ʿ-b-r) in the qal conjugation, “to cross” or “cross over,” used both for the advance of the Israelites (verse 21) and in Moses’s plea to God (verse 25). Such punning switches of meaning are a regular technique of biblical narrative employed to effect transitions and do not necessarily reflect thematic significance. (Compare, for example, Judges 3, in which Ehud first stabs [taqaʿ] the Midianite king Eglon in the belly and then, having effected his escape, blasts [taqaʿ] the ram’s horn to muster the Israelites to rebellion.)
Enough for you. This impatient phrase, rav lekha, pointedly echoes rav lakhem, “Long enough you . . .” addressed by God to the Israelites in 1:6 and 2:3.