Og of Bashan

Account

Og, king of Bashan, is remembered as the last of the Rephaim - a line of formidable figures associated with the fertile highlands east of the Jordan. Deuteronomy records that he ruled sixty fortified cities with high walls, gates, and bars, and that his bedstead of iron, nine cubits long and four cubits wide, was kept in Rabbah of the Ammonites "to this day." The measurement functions as royal hyperbole and as a relic-notice: the reader is invited to imagine a body that required such furniture, whether or not any bed was ever measured by a modern hand.