Og Rode Noah's Ark and Died at Moses' Feet

Seven hundred thousand of them stood in the rain and shouted at the ark's door. Noah would not open it. He had been telling them for a hundred and twenty years that the water was coming, and now that it was here they wanted in. The giants in the crowd thought the whole business was a joke. If the flood came down from above, they said, it would never reach their necks, and if it rose from below, their feet were broad enough to plug the springs. So God sent every drop through Gehenna (the realm of judgment after death) before it fell, and the rain came down hot enough to scald the skin off a man. The crowd rushed the door. The wild beasts keeping watch around the hull turned on them and drove them back into the water.

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One giant was not in that crowd. Og was already on the roof.

The Oath He Swore Before the First Cloud

He had made his arrangement early. He came to Noah and swore that if they let him ride, he and every child he ever fathered would be their slaves forever, in perpetuity, with no term and no release. There was no room for him below. Noah put him on top of the vessel, cut a hole in the roof, and passed his food up through it once a day.

The reem was too big to fit as well, so Noah tied it to the hull by a rope, and it swam behind. That was the manifest. Inside, the clean animals in sevens and the unclean in pairs. Outside, one rope-hauled beast and one giant lying flat on the pitch.

The Year on the Roof

When the waters lifted the ark, everything inside it was thrown around like lentils in a boiling pot. The lions roared. The oxen lowed. The wolves howled. Every creature aboard cried out in whatever sound it had, and Noah and his sons wept and thought they had come to the gates of death. Noah prayed out loud from the middle of it: "O Lord, help us, for we have no strength to bear this. The waves have surrounded us. Death is in front of our faces."

Above all of it, Og held on.

For a hundred and fifty days the water stood fifteen ells above the earth and did not drop an inch. Under those fifteen ells lay everyone Og had ever known. The Nefilim had eaten the world bare, then eaten the people who fed them, and then eaten each other. Two of them alone had gone through a thousand oxen, a thousand camels, and a thousand horses in a single day. Now they were all under the water and Og was on the roof, eating bread through a hole.

The Errand He Ran to Abraham

Generations later he turned up in the valleys of Mamre on the eve of Passover and found Abraham making unleavened cakes. He had news. Four kings had taken Lot away captive, and someone ought to go after them.

He said it helpfully. He wanted Abraham dead. Four kings and their armies against one household seemed like arithmetic that could only end one way, and when Abraham did not come back, Sarah would be free. Abraham armed his men, rode north, broke the kings, and brought his nephew home. Og went away with nothing and waited, which he was good at.

The Mountain He Carried on His Head

He was still king in Bashan when Israel came up out of the wilderness and camped below him. He looked down at the tents and had an idea the size of himself. He walked to the nearest mountain, worked it loose from its roots, tore it out, and set it on his head to carry it over and drop it on the camp.

Ants got into it while he walked. They bored through the stone the whole way, and the mountain crumbled and settled down around his neck, and there he stood in the open with a mountain on his shoulders and no way to lift it off or throw it.

Moses had been warned not to fear him and feared him anyway. This was the one who had outlived the flood, who had stood in front of Abraham and walked away, who had been alive so long that no one could remember the world without him. The word came a second time: do not be afraid of him, I have given him into your hand. Moses took an axe ten cubits long. He was ten cubits tall himself. He jumped ten cubits into the air and struck Og in the ankle, and the last of the Rephaim came down.

The Bed He Left in Rabbah

His bed was nine cubits long and four wide, and the cubit that measured it was the length of his own forearm. He had put it in Rabbah, the Ammonite city, years before, and he had chosen that city on purpose. God had forbidden Israel to come near the descendants of Lot, and Ammon was Lot's. Whatever Israel did to Bashan, they could not cross that border. The bed would keep.

He was right about the bed. It sat in Rabbah where anyone could go and look at it, in a city Israel was not permitted to enter, the last property of the last giant, who had calculated everything except the ants.