CHAPTER 24

The Place of the Serpent

I N NUMBERS 13 , THE ISRAELITES HAD ARRIVED AT THE BORDER OF CANAAN . Moses sent twelve spies into Canaan to report on the land and its inhabitants. They came back with the news that what God had said was true—the land was “flowing with milk and honey” (Num 13:27)—but then added, “there we saw the Nephilim (the sons of Anak, who come from the Nephilim), and we seemed to ourselves like grasshoppers, and so we seemed to them” ( ESV ).

The very next chapter of the book of Numbers tells us that, despite the miracles of their deliverance from Egypt, the people refused to believe that God would help them defeat the Anakim (“sons of Anak”). Because they rebelled, God sentenced them to wander in the desert for forty years until all who did not believe had died off. Only then would God bring them back to the promised land (Num 14:33–35). 1

Who were the Anakim? Were these giants the kind of monstrous beings we read about in Greek mythology? How many of them lived in the land? The text clearly connects them to the Nephilim, but how exactly were they connected?

Answers to these questions can only be understood when framed by the original ancient context of the biblical writers who put the Old Testament account of Israel’s history in its final form. It is no accident that, by all accounts, this work was finished in exile in Babylon. The biblical writers deliberately connect the giant clan enemies Israel would face in the conquest back to the ancient apostasies that had Babylon at their root: the sons of God and the Nephilim, and the disinheritance of the nations at the Tower of Babel.

These incidents inform the Israelite supernatural worldview. They are at the heart of what’s at stake in the war for the promised land. Israel will encounter two deadly forces: the descendants of the Nephilim and the people of nations under the dominion of hostile gods. The two are at times conflated in the narrative. Both must be defeated, but one in particular must be annihilated.

THE GIANTS OF THE TRANSJORDAN

As the forty years of wandering neared completion, God directed Moses to lead the new generation of Israelites (and the few members of the old generation whose faith had not failed) back toward Canaan. But instead of heading into Canaan from the south as before, God brought them alongside Canaan through territory to the east (the “Transjordan”). (See map on next page.)

This was no accident. Deuteronomy 2 ( ESV ) picks up the story.

8  So we went on, away from our brothers, the people of Esau, who live in Seir, away from the Arabah road from Elath and Ezion-geber.

9  “And we turned and went in the direction of the wilderness of Moab. 10  And the LORD said to me, ‘Do not harass Moab or contend with them in battle, for I will not give you any of their land for a possession, because I have given Ar to the people of Lot for a possession.’ 10  (The Emim formerly lived there, a people great and many, and tall as the Anakim. 11  Like the Anakim they are also counted as Rephaim, but the Moabites call them Emim. 12  The Horites also lived in Seir formerly, but the people of Esau dispossessed them and destroyed them from before them and settled in their place, as Israel did to the land of their possession, which the LORD gave to them.) …

17  … the LORD said to me, 18  ‘Today you are to cross the border of Moab at Ar. 19  And when you approach the territory of the people of Ammon, do not harass them or contend with them, for I will not give you any of the land of the people of Ammon as a possession, because I have given it to the sons of Lot for a possession.’ 20  (It is also counted as a land of Rephaim. Rephaim formerly lived there—but the Ammonites call them Zamzummim—21  a people great and many, and tall as the Anakim; but the LORD destroyed them before the Ammonites, and they dispossessed them and settled in their place, 22  as he did for the people of Esau, who live in Seir, when he destroyed the Horites before them and they dispossessed them and settled in their place even to this day. 23  As for the Avvim, who lived in villages as far as Gaza, the Caphtorim, who came from Caphtor, destroyed them and settled in their place) (Deut 2:8–23).

We learn several things of significance in this passage and its geography. Proceeding from south to north, the Edomites, Moabites, and Ammonites were to be left unmolested by the Israelites because God had long ago allotted that land to Abraham’s nephew Lot and his grandson, Esau, Jacob’s brother. It is fascinating to note (vv. 10–11, 19–20) that giants had once lived in those territories prior to the arrival of Moses, Joshua, and the Israelites. These giant clans were known among the Moabites and Ammonites as the Emim and the Zamzummim. Other inhabitants had also been driven out: the Horites, the Avvim, and the Caphtorim. These tribal groups are never themselves referred to as being unusually tall, though they surface in connection with giant clans in a number of other passages. 2 The thing to observe here is that these giant clans had already been removed from the land promised to Abraham’s descendants by the descendants of Esau and Lot, who were also descended from Abraham, like Israel (vv. 12, 21).

These giant clans were related to the Anakim (vv. 10–11), who were, of course, “from the Nephilim” (Num 13:32–33). We aren’t told specifically how the bloodline lineages worked, but we are told a relationship existed. Additionally, all of these groups seem to also have been referred to as Rephaim (vv. 11, 20), a term that will take on more importance as we proceed. 3

MARCHING TO SIHON … AND BASHAN

God told Moses to ask travel permission of the sons of Lot and Esau as the Israelites journeyed northward through the Transjordan. They received that permission (Deut 2:27–29) and passed through. They were on their way at God’s leading to what was actually the last area under the dominion of the Nephilim bloodline in the Transjordan. Moses is seemingly unaware of God’s aim in this leg of the journey. Deuteronomy 2 ( ESV ) continues as Moses sends word to the enemy in God’s crosshairs:

26  “So I sent messengers from the wilderness of Kedemoth to Sihon the king of Heshbon, with words of peace, saying, 27  ‘Let me pass through your land. I will go only by the road; I will turn aside neither to the right nor to the left. 28  You shall sell me food for money, that I may eat, and give me water for money, that I may drink. Only let me pass through on foot, 29  as the sons of Esau who live in Seir and the Moabites who live in Ar did for me, until I go over the Jordan into the land that the LORD our God is giving to us.’ 30  But Sihon the king of Heshbon would not let us pass by him, for the LORD your God hardened his spirit and made his heart obstinate, that he might give him into your hand, as he is this day (Deut 2:26–30 ESV ).

Did you catch the last line? God hardened the heart of Sihon. The wording is designed to make us think of God’s battle with Pharaoh, the presumed god of Egypt. It was time for Sihon to go. But why target him? The answer to that question requires a look back into biblical history, and then a look forward into the next chapter of Deuteronomy. Let’s look back first—to Abraham.

In Genesis 15 , one of the passages where Yahweh appeared to Abraham to form a covenant relationship with him, God told Abraham the following in a dream:

13  Know for certain that your offspring will be sojourners in a land that is not theirs and will be servants there, and they will be afflicted for four hundred years. 14  But I will bring judgment on the nation that they serve, and afterward they shall come out with great possessions. 15  As for you, you shall go to your fathers in peace; you shall be buried in a good old age. 16  And they shall come back here in the fourth generation, for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete (Gen 15:13–16 ESV ).

God told Abraham that his descendants (the people of Edom, Ammon, Moab, and, of course, Israel) would live in bondage but would one day return to the land of promise—at a time when the iniquity of the Amorites had reached the point when God was ready to judge it. Why Sihon? He was an Amorite king (Deut 3:2). But why the Amorites?

The historical material on the Amorites is sparse. Broadly speaking, the Amorite culture was Mesopotamian . The term and the people are known from Sumerian and Akkadian material centuries older than the Old Testament and the time of Moses and the Israelites. The word for “Amorite” actually comes from a Sumerian word (“MAR.TU”) which vaguely referred to the area and population west of Sumer and Babylon .

The use of “Amorite” in the Old Testament is indiscriminate. 4 In some passages it’s a label for the entire population of Canaan (Josh 7:7). 5 In that sense, “Amorites” and “Canaanites” are interchangeable, both denoting non-Israelite in the land of Canaan. 6 In other passages its use is more specific to one people group among several within Canaan (Gen 15:19–21). 7

“Canaanites” and “Amorites” were therefore generic terms used to describe the enemies of Israel. Of the two, “Amorites” takes on a more sinister tone in the context of the Babylonian polemic that precedes this point in Israel’s story. Tarring and feathering the inhabitants of Canaan with a label that would take an Israelite reader back to supernatural disasters of Genesis 6 and 11 would have a profound theological effect.

But the connection is actually more direct than rhetoric. One passage in Scripture specifically connects the Amorites (Canaanites) to the giants that were derivative of the Nephilim. 8 God says through the prophet Amos:

9  Yet it was I who destroyed the Amorite before them,

whose height was like the height of the cedars

and who was as strong as the oaks;

I destroyed his fruit above

and his roots beneath.

10  Also it was I who brought you up out of the land of Egypt

and led you forty years in the wilderness,

to possess the land of the Amorite (Amos 2:9–10 ESV ).

Note that the context for this statement is the exodus and the conquest. That at least some Amorites were unusually tall would have been proof to the Israelites they had descended from the Nephilim—and that case, of course, was made in Num 13:32–33. For an Israelite, all this meant that the native population of Canaan had a supernaturally sinister point of origin. This wouldn’t be just a battle for land. It was a battle between Yahweh and the other gods—gods who had raised up competing human bloodlines that were opposed to Yahweh’s plan and people.

Something else about Sihon factors into this interpretation. He was allied to a fellow named Og, another king of the Amorites who ruled in the region of Bashan. Og was a giant . Deuteronomy 3 ( ESV ) tells us what happened after Israel’s battle with Sihon:

Then we turned and went up the way to Bashan. And Og the king of Bashan came out against us, he and all his people, to battle at Edrei. 2  But the LORD said to me, ‘Do not fear him, for I have given him and all his people and his land into your hand. And you shall do to him as you did to Sihon the king of the Amorites, who lived at Heshbon.’ 3  So the LORD our God gave into our hand Og also, the king of Bashan, and all his people, and we struck him down until he had no survivor left.… 6  And we devoted them to destruction, as we did to Sihon the king of Heshbon, devoting to destruction every city, men, women, and children. 7  But all the livestock and the spoil of the cities we took as our plunder. 8  So we took the land at that time out of the hand of the two kings of the Amorites who were beyond the Jordan, from the Valley of the Arnon to Mount Hermon 9  (the Sidonians call Hermon Sirion, while the Amorites call it Senir), 10  all the cities of the tableland and all Gilead and all Bashan, as far as Salecah and Edrei, cities of the kingdom of Og in Bashan. 11  (For only Og the king of Bashan was left of the remnant of the Rephaim. Behold, his bed was a bed of iron. Is it not in Rabbah of the Ammonites? Nine cubits was its length, and four cubits its breadth, according to the common cubit) (Deut 3:1–11 ESV ).

For an ancient Israelite reader with a command of Hebrew and a worldview that included the idea that supernatural opposition to Israel had something to do with preflood events in Mesopotamia, several things in this short passage would have jumped out immediately. None of them are obvious in English translation.

First, the most immediate link back to the Babylonian polemic is Og’s bed (Hebrew: ʿeres ). 9 Its dimensions (9 × 4 cubits) are precisely those of the cultic bed in the ziggurat called Etemenanki—which is the ziggurat most archaeologists identify as the Tower of Babel referred to in the Bible. 10 Ziggurats functioned as temples and divine abodes. The unusually large bed at Etemenanki was housed in “the house of the bed” ( bit erši ). It was the place where the god Marduk and his divine wife, Zarpanitu, met annually for ritual lovemaking, the purpose of which was divine blessing upon the land. 11

Scholars have been struck by the precise correlation. It’s hard not to conclude that, as with Genesis 6:1–4, so with Deuteronomy 3 , those who put the finishing touches on the Old Testament during the exile in Babylon were connecting Marduk and Og in some way. The most transparent path is in fact giant stature. Og is said to have been the last of the Rephaim—a term connected to the giant Anakim and other ancient giant clans in the Transjordan (Deut 2:11, 20). Marduk, like other deities in antiquity, was portrayed as superhuman in size. 12 However, the real matrix of ideas in the mind of the biblical author may be derived from wordplay based on Babylonian mythology. 13

Second, Deuteronomy 3 mentions Og’s reign over the city of Edrei (v. 10). Joshua 12:4–5, which looks back on the battle with Og, refers to him as the king of Bashan and living at Ashtaroth and Edrei. 14 These terms—Ashtaroth, Edrei, and Bashan—were theologically loaded terms for an Israelite, and even for their neighbors who worshiped other gods.

Ashtaroth, Edrei, and the Rephaim are mentioned by name in Ugaritic texts. 15 The Rephaim of Ugarit are not described as giants. Rather, they are quasi-divine dead warrior kings who inhabit the underworld. In the Ugaritic language, the location of Ashtaroth and Edrei was not spelled Bashan, but was pronounced and spelled Bathan . The linguistic note is intriguing since Bashan/Bathan both also mean “serpent,” so that the region of Bashan was “the place of the serpent.” 16 As we saw earlier, the divine serpent ( nachash , another word so translated) became lord of the dead after his rebellion in Eden. In effect, Bashan was considered the location of (to borrow a New Testament phrase) “the gates of hell.” Later Jewish writers understood these conceptual connections. Their intersection is at the heart of why books like 1 Enoch teach that demons are actually the spirits of dead Nephilim. 17

Lastly, aside from Bashan being the gateway to the underworld, the region has another sinister feature identified in the Deuteronomy 3 passage: Mount Hermon. According to 1 Enoch 6:1–6 , Mount Hermon was the place where the sons of God of Genesis 6 descended when they came to earth to cohabit with human women—the episode that produced the Nephilim. 18 Joshua 12:4–5 unites all the threads: “Og king of Bashan, one of the remnant of the Rephaim, who lived at Ashtaroth and at Edrei and ruled over Mount Hermon.”

Just the name “Hermon” would have caught the attention of Israelite and Jewish readers. In Hebrew it’s pronounced khermon . The noun has the same root as a verb that is of central importance in Deuteronomy 3 and the conquest narratives: kharam , “to devote to destruction.” This is the distinct verb of holy war , the verb of extermination. It has deep theological meaning, a meaning explicitly connected to the giant clans God commanded Joshua and his armies to eradicate. It is to that phase of the war for the land that we now turn.