Mortal · c. 1200 BCE
Og of Bashan
Also called Og king of Bashan
A king east of the Jordan, described as the last remnant of the Rephaim, and evidenced in his own text by a piece of furniture — an iron bedstead nine cubits long, on display at Rabbah.
Well sourced
Deuteronomy 3:11 is unusual in this corpus because it argues. Having said that Og alone remained of the remnant of the Rephaim, the verse offers proof a reader could go and check: his bedstead is of iron, nine cubits by four, and is it not in Rabbah of the children of Ammon? A text producing a measurable object in support of a claim about size is doing something none of the giant material around it attempts.
What the object was is a separate question the corpus leaves open. Iron in the Late Bronze Age was rare and prestigious; proposals that the bedstead was a basalt sarcophagus, or a bed of the kind kept in a shrine, are readings of the noun rather than of the evidence. Either way Og is a king with a territory, a capital and a defeat, and the giant epithet attaches to a man the text is otherwise happy to treat as an ordinary opponent.
At a glance
Vitals
Vitals
Also known as
- First attested
- Hebrew Bible & Deuterocanon · c. 900–100 BCE
- Named there as
- Og
- Rank
- The Last of the Rephaim
- Era
- c. 1200 BCE
- Traditions
- Jewish
Stats
Known connections
Chain of command
1 attributed
What is it said to do?
Where these powers cluster
The 1 offices attributed to Og of Bashan, grouped by kind. Segment width is the share of powers falling in each category.
A bar dominated by one colour means a specialist; an even spread means a figure the sources credit with almost anything.
- martial1
2 texts
Which texts say so, and where do they disagree?
When these texts were written
Each dot is one of the 2 texts that names Og of Bashan, placed at that text's approximate date.
A wide spread means the figure was carried across many centuries and traditions; a tight cluster means a single period produced the whole record.
2 texts spanning roughly 493 years
Where the texts differ
- Rank: given as King of Bashan, of the remnant of the Rephaim; King of the Amorites
Defeated at Edrei with his sixty walled cities taken, Numbers 21:33-35 and Deuteronomy 3:1-11, where he is named as the last of the remnant of the Rephaim and his iron bedstead is cited as evidence still on view at Rabbah.
Josephus retells the campaign east of the Jordan and dwells on Og's size and strength, which is the point at which a biblical epithet starts becoming a legend with details of its own.
Connections
What is it connected to?
Answered from the sources
Common questions
Which texts mention Og of Bashan?
What rank is Og of Bashan?
How else is Og of Bashan spelled?
What is Og of Bashan said to do?
How old is Og of Bashan?
Nearest in the corpus
If Og of Bashan is what you came for, these are next
Chosen by proximity rather than by popularity: the same pantheon first, then the same rank, then the same kind of figure.
The Rephaim
A People, and the Dead
One word doing two jobs: a people east of the Jordan, and the shades of the dead — a double sense the Ugaritic texts already carry centuries before the Hebrew ones.
Goliath
Champion of Gath
The Philistine champion of 1 Samuel 17, and the best-known giant in any of these texts — whose height the manuscripts do not agree on, and whose death the Hebrew Bible reports twice with two different killers.
Jezebel
Queen of Israel · Canaanite
A Phoenician princess married to Ahab, who backed Baal and Asherah against the prophets of Israel. Revelation later borrows her name for a rival teacher, and it has been a label rather than a person ever since.
Nimrod
The First Mighty One
The first man the Bible calls mighty on the earth, founder of Babel, Erech and Akkad — a king in Genesis and nothing worse, who becomes a tyrant everywhere afterwards.
Enkidu
The Wild Man · Mesopotamian
Formed from clay to be Gilgamesh's match and made human by a week with a woman, he is the corpus's clearest statement that civilisation is a loss as well as a gain.
The Anakim
A People of Great Stature
A people of Hebron whom the scouts of the Hebrew Bible report as impossibly tall and identify with the Nephilim — inside the very report the text goes on to call false.
The books behind Og of Bashan
Every claim on this profile is attributed to one of these. They are public domain, listed oldest first, and each links to a full text where one is freely available.
Hebrew Bible & Deuterocanon
Various · c. 900–100 BCE · Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek
Read Hebrew Bible & Deuterocanon in full ↗Cover: Public domain · see en:Aleppo Codex; scanned by · Wikimedia file page
Antiquities of the Jews
Flavius Josephus; trans. William Whiston, 1737 · c. 93 CE · Greek
Read Antiquities of the Jews in full ↗
Corpus last revised 29 August 2026. A reference site’s credibility rests on being maintained, so this is the date the sourced records last changed — not the date the page was rebuilt.