Og Mocked Baby Isaac at the Weaning Feast and Sealed His Doom

The cradle had not been rocked in any house before this one. Now it rocked in the tent of Abraham, and the child inside it laughed, and the whole world had come to watch him do it.

They had come because the feast was great. The day Isaac was weaned, Abraham set out the long tables, and the great ones of every kingdom took their places along them. Thirty-one kings reclined among the guests, and the thirty-second, the king of Jericho with his deputy beside him, made the count come out strange when anyone tried to total it later. Joshua would one day kill every one of these men. For now they ate Abraham's bread and drank Abraham's wine and leaned in to see the heir who had been promised to a man old enough to be dust.

The Giant Who Came to See the Heir

Among them sat a creature the tables had to be rebuilt to hold. Og stood nine cubits when he stood, nine by the measure of his own forearm, so that a man laid head to foot beside him would not reach his knee. His bed was iron because no wood would bear him. He had seen more years than any guest at the feast, more years than the feast could imagine, because Og had walked out of a slaughter that erased his entire kind.

Once the Rephaim had filled the earth, a race of giants, the last shadow of the age before the Flood. Then Amraphel and the kings with him fell on them at Ashteroth-karnaim and cut them down to nothing. One escaped. Scripture would not even call him by his name there. It called him only "the one who escaped," the way a farmer speaks of the olives that drop early and never ripen, the runt fruit, the leftover. That escapee had run to Abraham's door once before, years ago, breathless, to tell him his nephew Lot had been taken. The same Og. The least of the giants, mightiest now only because everyone taller than him was dead.

One Finger on the Gift of God

The great ones turned to Og at the table, half teasing, the way powerful men test each other. "Were you not the one always saying it," they said. "That Abraham was a barren mule. That he would never father a child."

Og looked down the length of the tables to the cradle, to the small thing wrapped and laughing in it, the whole inheritance of a covenant balanced inside a basket.

"And now," he said. "What is this gift of his. A feeble little thing. If I set one finger on it, I would crush it."

The laughter at the tables did not get the chance to finish.

The Great One of the worlds was present at that feast. He had been at the table all along, unseen among the kings, and Og's words went up to Him like smoke off the meat. The answer came down on the giant where he sat.

"You mock My gift," the voice said. "By your own life, you will see thousands of thousands and tens of thousands of tens of thousands come out of this child's children. And the end of you, of you, will be to fall by their hand and no other."

Og had a finger he could have crushed an infant with. The sentence handed back to him was that the infant's seed would crush him, and that nothing else in all the centuries between now and then would be allowed to do it first.

The Long Walk Toward the Appointment

So Og went on living. He lived the way a man lives who has been told the date of his death is fixed and far. Kingdoms rose around him in Bashan and he took their crowns. He grew into the giant the wars would whisper about, the one whose iron bed they kept in Rabbath of the children of Ammon, because even God had ringed that city with a command that Israel must not provoke it, and so the bed of the last giant rested in the one place no Israelite hand would reach to disturb it.

Men measured themselves against the memory of him for generations. When Goliath came down into the valley to curse Israel, six cubits and a span, the armies called him the in-between man, the champion who stood between two heights. Two cubits and a span taller than any ordinary soldier. Two cubits and a span short of a true giant. Short, that is, of Og. The Philistine who froze a whole army was a middling thing measured against the creature who had once promised to flick an infant out of the world.

The Heir's Seed Comes to Bashan

The infant grew. Isaac fathered Jacob, and Jacob fathered the tribes, and the tribes became the thousands of thousands the voice had counted out at the feast, until they stood at last at the edge of Bashan with Og's kingdom in front of them and a man named Moses at their head.

Moses looked up at Og and was afraid, because memory has weight, and this was the oldest enemy on the earth. But the word came as it had come once before over a cradle. "Do not fear him. I have given him into your hand." The promise made at the weaning feast was being paid out, syllable for syllable, to the seed it had named.

And then the strangest mercy. When Og fell, his whole land fell with him, every city, without another sword's stroke. God had drawn all of Og's warriors out to stand with their king on that one field, so that when the king went down the cities behind him held only women and children and no army at all. Israel could never have taken Bashan stronghold by stronghold. The Amorite cities were too many and too strong, and the conquest would have ground on past the lifetimes of the men marching. Instead it ended in an afternoon, because the appointment had been kept.

The runt of the giants, the leftover olive, the one who had outlasted his entire vanished race, lay dead at the feet of a man descended from the baby he had offered to crush with a finger. The cradle had been rocked. The laughing child had won.