Mortal · c. 1200 BCE
The Rephaim
Also called The Rephaites, The shades
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.
Well sourced
The Hebrew Bible uses rephaim in two ways that look unrelated until Ugarit is set beside them. It is a people: Og of Bashan is the last of them, his territory is the land of the Rephaim, and their towns are listed. And it is the dead: Isaiah has the rephaim of Sheol stirred up to meet the descending king of Babylon, and Proverbs uses the word for the shades who do not rise.
The Ugaritic rpum are the join. There they are an assembly of the honoured dead, ancestral and royal, invoked and feasted — which makes the biblical double usage the survival of a single older idea rather than two words that happen to look alike. It is one of the clearest cases in the corpus of a Canaanite institution surviving inside Hebrew vocabulary after the institution itself was refused.
The people have names, and the corpus now carries them separately. Og of Bashan is the last of the remnant, with an iron bedstead offered as evidence. The four champions killed by David's men are said to have been born to ha-rapha in Gath — the singular of this word — and one of them is Goliath, or Goliath's brother, depending on which of the two parallel accounts is being read.
Identity
Where does the name come from?
What the name means
Hebrew *rephaim*, and the doubled sense is in the lexicons rather than invented by readers. BDB (1906) gives two separate entries: shades or ghosts, perhaps connected with the root as the sunken, powerless ones; and an old race of giants, perhaps the same word again, as extinct and powerless, or as shadowy and vaguely known. Klein (1987) does the same and calls the second of uncertain etymology, possibly originally identical with the first. Two standard works hedging in the same direction: the dead and the giants may be one word, and neither will say so outright.
At a glance
Vitals
Vitals
Also known as
- First attested
- The Baal Cycle (Ugaritic Tablets) · c. 1400-1200 BCE
- Named there as
- rpum
- Rank
- A People, and the Dead
- Era
- c. 1200 BCE
- Traditions
- Jewish, Canaanite & Ugaritic
Stats
Known connections
Chain of command
1 attributed
What is it said to do?
Where these powers cluster
The 1 offices attributed to The Rephaim, 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.
- transformation1
transformation
- Raises or Speaks with the DeadThe Baal Cycle (Ugaritic Tablets)
The rpum are summoned and feasted as the honoured dead.
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 The Rephaim, 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 900 years
Where the texts differ
- Name: given as rpum, Rephaim
- Rank: given as The assembly of the honoured dead; A people, and the shades of the dead
The Ugaritic texts know an assembly of ancestral and royal dead who are summoned and feasted, which is the sense standing behind the Hebrew word's second use.
A people east of the Jordan of whom Og of Bashan is the remnant, at Deuteronomy 3:11 and Joshua 12:4. The same word is the shades of Sheol at Isaiah 14:9 and 26:14, and in Proverbs 21:16.
Connections
What is it connected to?
Served by Og of Bashan
Deuteronomy 3:11 calls him the last of the remnant of the Rephaim. Membership rather than service; the corpus has no kind for belonging to a people.
Served by The Sons of Rapha
2 Samuel 21:22 says all four were born to ha-rapha in Gath — the singular behind the plural this entry carries. Membership, not service.
Answered from the sources
Common questions
Which texts mention The Rephaim?
What rank is The Rephaim?
How else is The Rephaim spelled?
What is The Rephaim said to do?
How old is The Rephaim?
Nearest in the corpus
If The Rephaim 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.
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.
Og of Bashan
The Last of the Rephaim
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.
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 The Rephaim
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.
The Baal Cycle (Ugaritic Tablets)
Anonymous; recovered at Ras Shamra · c. 1400-1200 BCE · Ugaritic
Read The Baal Cycle (Ugaritic Tablets) in full ↗Cover: CC BY-SA 3.0 · Unknown artist · Wikimedia file page
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
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.