The Israelites certainly did when they encountered OG, the king of Bashan.
The story of their battle with Og is wild, and it starts at the very edge of Edrei. Imagine this: The Israelites arrive near the city as night begins to fall. Exhausted, they prepare for battle the next day. Moses, their leader, wakes at the crack of dawn, ready to strike. He looks toward the city, and what does he see? An entirely new, massive wall seemingly erected overnight! He cries out in astonishment.
But here’s the thing: there was no wall.
According to Legends of the Jews, as retold by Ginzberg, the "wall" was actually OG himself, sitting on the actual wall, his feet planted firmly on the ground below. Moses, peering through the morning mist, simply mistook Og's immense size for a newly built fortification. Can you blame him?
Og was that big.
We're talking legendary proportions. Think Goliath, then supersize him. And this isn't just hearsay. We have accounts that try to quantify the sheer scale of this giant. One particularly vivid description comes from a grave-digger of later times.
He claimed that Og's thigh bone alone measured more than three parasangs. A parasang, by the way, is an ancient unit of distance, roughly equivalent to 3-4 miles!
Abba Saul even recounts a story, preserved in the tradition, that underscores this point: "Once," he says, "I hunted a stag which fled into the thigh bone of a dead man. I pursued it and ran along three parasangs of the thigh-bone, yet had not reached its end." This bone, it was later determined, belonged to none other than OG.
It's a mind-boggling image, isn't it? An entire chase scene unfolding inside a single bone. It really drives home the point: OG was an adversary unlike any other.
So, what are we to make of this story? Is it simply a fantastical tale meant to entertain? Perhaps. But it's also a powerful reminder that even the most daunting obstacles, the "giants" in our own lives, can be overcome. Even when they seem as large as a city wall, we can, like Moses, find the courage to face them.