You'll recall from Chapter 13, when the twelve men returned from spying out the land of Canaan, that ten of the men were dismayed by the people of large stature that they saw there. We don't know how many giants were in Canaan but the ten men said that in comparison to the giants they saw themselves "as grasshoppers in our own eyes, and we seemed the same to them". (Numbers 13:33b)
Today Israel will defeat a king who is one of these giants. In yesterday's passage Sihon, king of the Amorites, attacked Israel without cause. The Lord gave Israel victory in battle and allowed Israel to inhabit Amorite territory in the Arnon River Valley. We concluded yesterday's passage with this verse, "So Israel settled in the land of the Amorites." We pick up there with Moses sending men to spy out the next Amorite city along the way to the promised land, which is Jazer.
Israel came in peace when she asked Sihon to let her cross through the Amorite territory to get to the promised land. Sihon wickedly made war with her and now, because Israel has killed the king and defeated his soldiers at the Amorite capitol city of Heshbon, the Amorites are going to be hostile to the Israelites. Moving forward is going to require engaging Amorites in battle, so Moses sends men to check out Jazer to plan a method of taking the city. The Lord is training the Israelites for taking Canaan. Israel needs the training of fighting and winning smaller battles in order to have the experience and confidence to fight the bigger battles ahead.
"After Moses had sent spies to Jazer, the Israelites captured its surrounding settlements and drove out the Amorites who were there. Then they turned and went up along the road toward Bashan, and Og king of Bashan and his whole army marched out to meet them in battle at Edrei." (Numbers 21:32-33) Og is of Amorite heritage, which we'll discuss later by taking a verse from the book of Deuteronomy. Instead of rushing out to make peace with Israel---with the nation whose God is so mighty in war---he goes on the offensive to attack Israel. Did he think Israel was coming to attack him since her soldiers have already taken two Amorite cities: Heshbon and Jazer? It's possible he did think that, but at the same time he must have known that Sihon caused his own downfall by treating Israel poorly, and he must have known that instead of engaging Israel in battle he could have sent emissaries to make peace instead. Many kings since the creation of the world have avoided war in this manner. Og could have taken the initiative to issue an invitation to Israel to pass unmolested through his land on their way to Canaan. He could have even shown them hospitality or have given them police escorts, so to speak, to make sure that no one bothered them as they traveled through. Instead he puts himself and his men in an unwinnable position. God is on Israel's side. God will ensure Israel wins the battle.
Before the battle begins, the Lord is going to reassure the Israelites that they will be victorious. I think it's highly likely that the soldiers of Israel were vastly outnumbered by Og's soldiers. Later in today's study we'll be looking at a corresponding passage from Deuteronomy and in it we'll learn just how many cities were under Og's control. If he conscripted soldiers from that many cities then his army was large indeed. Later on we'll also learn that Og was a man of extremely tall stature, so tall that the sight of him would have been enough to intimidate anyone. "The Lord said to Moses, 'Do not be afraid of him, for I have delivered him into your hands, along with his whole army and his land. Do to him what you did to Sihon king of the Amorites, who reigned in Heshbon." (Numbers 21:32-33) God tells the soldiers not to be afraid and He does this because the soldiers are afraid. I can think of no other reason why He'd issue this message if not to give them some badly-needed courage. God doesn't waste time and He doesn't waste words. He wouldn't tell the men not to be afraid unless they were afraid. God is so good! He knows exactly what the soldiers need and He gives it to them. The Lord is the true general of Israel's army and like a good general He rallies the troops.
"So they struck him down, together with his sons and his whole army, leaving them no survivors. And they took possession of his land." (Numbers 21:35) The book of Deuteronomy supplies us with extra details about this battle and about the cities that had been under Og's control. "So the Lord our God also gave into our hands Og king of Bashan and all his army. We struck them down, leaving no survivors. At that time we took all his cities. There was not one of the sixty cities that we did not take from them---the whole region of Argob, Og's kingdom in Bashan. All these cities were fortified with high walls and with gates and bars, and there were also a great many unwalled villages. We completely destroyed them, as we had done with Sihon king of Heshbon, destroying every city---men, women and children. But all the livestock and the plunder from their cities we carried off for ourselves." (Deuteronomy 3:3-7) They give the Lord the credit for their victory and they supply an important item of information: there were sixty cities under Og's control. If soldiers from sixty cities came out to engage Israel in battle, no wonder Israel needed reassurance from the Lord! In addition to that, we see the Lord training them to take heavily fortified walled cities, which is something they will have to do a number of times after crossing into the promised land.
"So at that time we took from these two kings of the Amorites the territory east of the Jordan, from the Arnon Gorge as far as Mount Hermon. (Hermon is called Sirion by the Sidonians; the Amorites call it Senir.) We took all the towns on the plateau, and all Gilead, and all Bashan as far as Salekah and Edrei, towns of Og's kingdom in Bashan." (Deuteronomy 3:8-10) I mentioned earlier that Og was an Amorite. This passage from Deuteronomy is where that information comes from.
Deuteronomy tells us another bit of trivia about Og, and it's fascinating. "(Og king of Bashan was the last of the Rephaites. His bed was decorated with iron and was more than nine cubits long and four cubits wide. It is still in Rabbah of the Ammonites.)" (Deuteronomy 3:11) It's no wonder the Israelites took note of such a large bed and it's no wonder they measured it and that Moses wrote down its dimensions. This man's bed was fourteen feet long and six feet wide! When Moses wrote the book of Deuteronomy, and perhaps for a long time after that, the bed was in Rabbah. It sounds as if it was on display there and Moses appears to be inviting any doubters to go and take a look at it themselves.
I've seen people scoff at the idea that there actually were giants in the Bible days and I honestly don't understand their doubt, considering that numerous documented cases of gigantism (with accompanying photos in some cases) exist in modern times. If you go online and look up a list of modern giants and their heights, from the late 1800s up to the present time you'll find people who measured anywhere from seven feet tall to almost nine feet tall. The world record holder in this category, an American by the name of Robert Wardlow, was 8ft 11.1 inches tall. Some years back I stood beside a statue of him in a Ripley's Believe It Or Not Museum and it helped me to understand what the Israelites meant in Numbers 13 when they said they felt like grasshoppers in comparison to the giants in the promised land. I'm 5ft 5 inches tall. Robert Wardlow towered over me by about 3.5 feet, not to mention how much wider in stature he was than an average person. I felt like a grasshopper beside of his statue. Tall as he was, Robert Wardlow wouldn't have needed a bed fourteen feet long, so we can safely assume that Og king of Bashan was even taller. He might have been as much as twelve feet tall.
There's no reason why we should doubt that Og could have been twelve feet tall, for when a cemetery in France was excavated in 1890, bone measurements of one of the cemetery's inhabitants has led archaeologists to estimate that this man stood 11ft 6 inches tall in life. There's nothing unscientific about estimating a person's living height by this method; modern forensic experts do it the same way when they find scattered skeletal remains and bone fragments. A person's height can reasonably be calculated by measuring the length of the leg bones, for example, even if the leg bones are in fragments and have to be pieced together. The measurement of the long bones of the leg, along with the sex (a man would generally be expected to be taller) and overall build of the person (a large boned person would generally be expected to be taller than a person with very petite bone structure), gives these forensic experts a close estimation of the person's height in life. When the Bible says there were giants in the land of Canaan, we can accept that information as fact. When the Bible says Og's bed was fourteen feet long, it's because Og's bed actually was fourteen feet long and it's because Og needed a bed that was fourteen feet long.
Israel faced a giant in our text today and won with the help of the Lord. The land that was once under control of Og king of Bashan, along with the land that had been under control of King Sihon, will be parceled out to the Israelites as part of their inheritance from the Lord. This territory will belong to the Gadites, the Reubenites and the half tribe of Manasseh later in Numbers 32:33. These tribes will rebuild destroyed cities in the territory and build new settlements as well, which we'll talk about when we arrive at Numbers 32.
No matter how many giants come against us in this life and no matter what form they take, God is greater. God can not only give us the victory, but He can assure we leave the battle with far more than we had before going into it. While we live on this earth we are, in the words of my church pastor, "living in enemy territory". Our enemy the devil attacks us whenever and however he can. Our fellow human beings sometimes make themselves our enemy through no fault of our own. Sometimes they work against us as a way of attaining an advantage over us professionally, academically, or socially. Other times their motives are more obscure. They do wicked things to us because there is something very wrong in their hearts that causes them to take satisfaction in slandering us or cheating us out of something. I've known people who would slander someone's good name simply because while telling the untrue tale they become the center of attention for a very short time. We can't always fathom the motive for evil deeds because the motive is not understandable or logical to a child of God or even to an unbeliever who lives a moral and honest life. But no matter what a person does to us or says about us, God sees their actions and He hears their words. Just as God saw and heard and judged King Sihon and King Og who made themselves Israel's enemy, God sees and hears and will judge those who make themselves our enemies. God will judge our human enemies and the greatest enemy of mankind: the devil himself. He will cast the devil into the lake of fire for all eternity in Revelation 20:10. So, to quote another favorite statement of my pastor's, "We win in the end." Victory is assured in this life and in the life to come. So no matter what giants you're facing today, the Lord says to you what He said to the Israelites through Moses in verse 34 of today's passage: "Do not be afraid".
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