Sihon, Og, and the Mercy Hidden Inside Destruction

Og, king of Bashan, was so large that the rabbis said he had ridden on the roof of Noah's Ark during the Flood, too enormous to fit inside. He had survived the waters that drowned every other giant in the world, waited out the centuries, and now stood in the path of a people who had just crossed the wilderness. He was not a minor obstacle. He was the last of a species, a remnant of an earlier and more terrible age. And God told Moses not to fear him. That instruction, "do not fear him," is what first catches the attention of the rabbis in Midrash Tehillim.

What Made Sihon and Og So Dangerous?

Midrash Tehillim, compiled in the land of Israel over the fifth through ninth centuries CE, expands on Psalm 136:17-20, the verses that celebrate God's striking down of "great kings." Sihon, king of the Amorites, and Og, king of Bashan, are named specifically. The Psalm treats their defeat as a cause for endless gratitude, folding it into the great litany of God's mercies, "for His mercy endures forever." The text from Midrash Tehillim 136:6 asks the obvious question: why is the destruction of two kings an act of mercy? Mercy for whom?

The answer the midrash develops is layered. Sihon and Og were not simply military opponents. They were, in rabbinic tradition, protected by angelic powers, princes of the nations who stood behind them in the heavenly realm. Every nation had such a prince, an angelic representative in the divine court who argued for its survival and advancement. The defeat of Sihon and Og required first the defeat of their angelic patrons. God did not simply overpower two mortal kings. God dismantled the entire supernatural architecture that supported them.

Og Who Survived the Flood

The tradition about Og's extraordinary size and his survival of the Flood appears across multiple sources. Og rode on top of the Ark, clinging to it as the waters rose, sustained by Noah who passed food through a hole in the side. The tradition is preserved in the Midrash Aggadah collection, with over 3,205 texts, and is also discussed by Louis Ginzberg in the Legends of the Jews, published between 1909 and 1938. By the time Moses encountered him in the wilderness, Og was, by some rabbinic reckonings, thousands of years old. He remembered the world before the Flood. He had outlasted civilizations.

The rabbis ask why God preserved him. One answer: to demonstrate to Israel, at the moment of conquest, that no power is too ancient or too enormous to be removed when God decides it must be removed. Og's longevity was not protection. It was evidence. His finally falling in battle against a people carrying a revelation of divine law was designed to be witnessed and remembered. "For His mercy endures forever" is the Psalm's response to that fall, and the rabbis take that response seriously.

Why Destruction Can Be an Act of Mercy

This is the theological puzzle at the center of the midrash's treatment of Psalm 136. The repeated refrain, "for His mercy endures forever," accompanies descriptions of things that do not obviously look like mercy: plagues on Egypt, the drowning of Pharaoh's army, the striking down of Sihon and Og. The Kabbalistic tradition of the Zohar, first circulated in 13th-century Castile, Spain, developed an extensive framework for understanding how divine severity and divine mercy are not opposites but aspects of a single reality. But the Midrash Tehillim makes a simpler, more direct argument.

The mercy in Sihon and Og's destruction is mercy toward Israel. The two kings had blocked a path that Israel needed to walk. Their removal was not punishment in the abstract. It was the clearing of an obstacle for the sake of a people who had been waiting forty years in the wilderness. The mercy runs through the destruction, not around it. The plagues on Egypt were mercy for the enslaved. The drowning of the army was mercy for those who had just escaped. The falling of Sihon and Og was mercy for those who needed to reach the land. Each terrible act is, from another angle, someone's salvation.

The Angels Behind the Kings

The Midrash Tehillim's account of the angelic powers behind Sihon and Og connects to a broader rabbinic doctrine about the governance of nations. Each nation has a heavenly prince, a Sar, who represents it before the divine throne. When a nation rises or falls, its heavenly representative rises or falls with it. The angels associated with Sihon were not minor functionaries. They were powers that needed to be addressed before the earthly battle could be fought.

This framework, found across the midrashic tradition and elaborated in the apocalyptic literature of the Second Temple period, explains why Moses needed specific divine reassurance before engaging Og. God's instruction, "do not fear him," was not simply tactical encouragement. It was a statement about the heavenly battle that had already been decided. The angelic prince of Bashan had already been neutralized. What remained was the earthly expression of that heavenly decision.

What the Psalm Teaches About Giving Thanks

Psalm 136 is known in Jewish tradition as Hallel HaGadol, the Great Praise. The Midrash Tehillim's treatment of its verses about Sihon and Og is embedded in a larger argument about what it means to give genuine thanks. Gratitude that only covers the pleasant moments is shallow. The Psalm demands gratitude that covers everything, including the moments that looked, from the inside, like catastrophe. Israel walking past the places where Sihon and Og had stood was walking through former catastrophe that had become the ground of possibility.

The giant king whose fortress made him fearsome was now a story told to children, a memory of an obstacle that had been cleared. The rabbis preserve that story precisely so that future generations would know: when the path seems blocked by something ancient and enormous, something that has survived every previous catastrophe, that too is part of the arrangement. The mercy endures through the destruction. The path opens. And somewhere in the distance, a people that was afraid remembers that it has been afraid before, and walked through anyway.