Og Who Outlived the Flood and Finally Fell to Moses

Most giants in the Hebrew Bible get a single verse and vanish. Og, king of Bashan, gets a career. He appears at the edge of the Flood story, at the tent of Abraham, at a feast with Isaac, and finally at the battlefield of Edrei against Moses (Numbers 21:33, Deuteronomy 3:11). The aggadah reads those four scenes as one long arc — the biography of the last antediluvian giant, who rode out the Flood only to meet his end four centuries later at the hand of a man less than a third his age. Synthesized from Targum Pseudo-Jonathan (~7th-8th c. CE, Land of Israel) and Louis Ginzberg's Legends of the Jews (1909-1928), drawing on 2,672 texts from Ginzberg and 6,276 from Midrash Aggadah, the tradition insists Og's death was decreed long before Moses swung the axe.

How did Og survive the Flood at all?

The Torah lists eight human survivors of the Flood — Noah, his wife, his three sons, and their wives (Genesis 7:13). But one chapter later, in Abram's war against the four kings, a mysterious ha-palit, "the fugitive," arrives at Mamre to deliver news (Genesis 14:13). Who is this ninth survivor? Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 14:13) identifies him by name: Og. The Aramaic explains that Og rode the top of the ark like a barnacle, sustained by food Noah handed him through a window.

Ginzberg preserves the bargain in Legends of the Jews 4:46: Noah fed Og daily through a hole in the roof in exchange for a promise of eternal servitude from him and his descendants. The Targum is blunter about the divine logic — Og was spared not through high righteousness, but that the inhabitants of the world might see the power of the Lord. He survived as an exhibit. A walking archaeology of the antediluvian age.

The giant who served Abraham

The giant who rode the ark is now, generations later, a household slave. According to Legends of the Jews 5:101, Og is identified in some traditions with Eliezer, Abraham's steward — gifted to Abraham by Nimrod himself. His breadth was half his height. He required iron beds and iron chairs. He devoured a thousand oxen daily and washed them down with a thousand measures of liquid. Ginzberg notes that Abraham once rebuked him so fiercely that one of Og's teeth fell out, and Abraham — practical patriarch that he was — fashioned the tooth into a bed.

And yet this giant is the one the Targum sends to Mamre with news that Lot has been captured. Why? Because even then, the aggadah says, Og had an agenda. He hoped Abram would march against the four kings, die in battle, and leave Sarah unprotected. The covenant survived because God sees further than the messenger.

The feast where the giant mocked the gift

Abraham eventually freed Og as a reward for finding Rebekah for Isaac. God then made him a king — and the Midrash is pointed about why: God wanted to pay Og his reward in this world so he could claim none in the world to come. As king he founded sixty cities with walls sixty miles high at their lowest point.

But the moment that sealed his fate happened at a feast in Abraham's own tent. Legends of the Jews 5:194 describes the scene: the giant pointed at the small boy Isaac and sneered, "Were I to lay my finger upon him, he would be crushed." He had once called Abraham a sterile mule; now he mocked the gift that had finally come.

God intervened mid-feast: "Thou makest mock of the gift given to Abraham! As thou livest, thou shalt look upon millions and myriads of his descendants, and in the end thou shalt fall into their hands." The sentence was handed down centuries before Moses was born. Everything after was the sentence being carried out.

Why did Moses tremble before a giant already condemned?

When Moses finally reached Bashan, he hesitated. Legends of the Jews 5:102 records his reasoning: "I am only one hundred and twenty years old, whereas he is more than five hundred. Surely he could never have attained so great an age, had he not performed meritorious deeds." Og's longevity looked like divine favor. He had escaped Amraphel when every other giant fell. Perhaps Israel had sinned in the war against Sihon and forfeited protection.

God's reply cut through the arithmetic. Og's fate had nothing to do with his age. It was fixed at that feast, when he looked at Jacob's family with an evil eye on the road down to Egypt. "Thine eye shall burst, for thou shalt fall into their hands." The giant had been living on borrowed time for four centuries.

The mountain, the ants, and a twelve-cubit axe

The battle itself, as retold in Legends of the Jews 5:103, reads like a comic inversion of every giant story ever told. Og surveyed the Israelite camp — three parasangs across, about ten miles — and decided to end the war in a single motion. He uprooted a mountain three parasangs wide, lifted it onto his head, and marched toward the camp to drop it.

Then God sent ants. Tiny, divinely appointed ants bored holes through the mountain until it slipped over Og's ears and settled around his neck. He tried to shake it off, but his teeth grew outward into tusks that pinned the stone in place. Moses — the most humble of men (Numbers 12:3) — seized a twelve-cubit axe (about eighteen feet long), leapt ten cubits into the air, and struck the giant on the ankle. The colossus fell.

Legends of the Jews 5:105 closes the arc with a quiet administrative miracle. With Og dead, all his lands fell to Israel without another sword's stroke. God had arranged for every warrior in the kingdom of Bashan to be at Edrei that day; only women and children remained in the sixty cities.

The takeaway. Og's story is the aggadah's longest grudge. Four centuries between the mockery at Abraham's feast and the axe at Edrei, and not one moment was unobserved. What the giant did not know is that heaven keeps ledgers longer than any king's reign — and the sterile mule he laughed at became the millions into whose hands he finally fell.