Og Who Outlived the Flood and Finally Fell to Moses

The Giant Who Would Not Vanish

Most giants in the Hebrew Bible disappear after a verse. Og refuses to disappear. He is present at the Flood and survives it. He appears in Abraham's household as a servant. He mocks Isaac at a feast. He stands across the battlefield from Moses at Edrei with a mountain in his hands. He is killed. The tradition did not treat these appearances as scattered curiosities but as chapters in a single enormous biography.

How Og Survived the Flood

The Torah names eight human survivors: Noah, his wife, his three sons, their wives. Then Genesis 14:13 introduces a fugitive, ha-palit, who brings Abram news that Lot has been captured in war. The Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Genesis, an Aramaic paraphrase of the Torah composed roughly in the seventh or eighth century CE, identifies this fugitive as Og.

The Targum's explanation is precise. Og had been spared from the giants who drowned in the Flood by riding on the outside of the ark while Noah fed him through a window cut in the hull. He was not spared because of righteousness. He was spared so the world would see God's power over the giants who had rebelled. He survived as evidence, a breathing remnant of the age before the Flood.

The Midrash Aggadah, the aggadic commentary traditions, and the Legends of the Jews compiled by Louis Ginzberg (1909-1938 CE) add the detail of his size. He was so large that he could not fit inside the ark. He rode the outside. The timber of the hull was his saddle. The flood that drowned every living thing on earth lapped at his heels for forty days and he stayed on top.

In Abraham's House

After the Flood, Og entered Abraham's household. The tradition preserved in Ginzberg's synthesis and the aggadic sources behind it says he served as Eliezer's assistant, later as a household slave. He was enormous and useful. Abraham fed him and treated him according to his obligations as a master. Og served in the household of the man he would eventually betray.

The betrayal came at a feast. The tradition records that Og attended the celebration when Isaac was weaned. He looked at the child and said, out loud, before the gathered guests, that this child was Abraham's only joy, and that he, Og, could kill Isaac with a single finger. The boast was not idle. The finger of a giant who had survived the Flood could do what he claimed.

God heard it. God told Abraham that Og would receive his punishment in time but that his time was not yet. The death sentence for the mockery of Isaac at the feast was spoken at that table. Og would continue to live, to grow older, to outlast one generation after another, carrying that sentence inside him without knowing when it would fall due.

Moses Trembled and Was Reassured

Numbers 21:33-35 records the battle at Edrei briefly. Israel came out against Og king of Bashan, and they defeated him. God had told Moses before the battle: Do not fear him. But the tradition behind the text records that Moses was afraid. The man who had faced Pharaoh, who had stood at the Sea of Reeds, who had brought forty years of wilderness travel to a close, was frightened of Og.

The reason preserved in the midrashic tradition is that Moses had heard what Og had survived. A creature who rode the outside of the ark through forty days of rain, who had served in the house of Abraham and watched every patriarch from Noah to Jacob grow old and die while he continued standing, was not an ordinary enemy. Moses was afraid of something that time itself had not been able to finish.

God reassured him. The debt from the feast, the death sentence for the finger pointed at Isaac, was finally due. Moses killed Og. The tradition says Moses could not have reached Og's ankle from the ground. He had to leap with his weapon. The giant died at Edrei with his neck trapped in the socket of a mountain he had tried to hurl at the Israelite camp.