The Giant Rephaim (Gen 6:4)

Adam’s Aftermath

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Last Sunday we were reading about the 120-year limit on human age installed in Gen 6:3 by YHWH to prevent human beings from getting too god-like. Now, suddenly, the title of today’s post claims we are going to be talking about the Rephaim, who do not appear until Genesis 14, in the story about the war of the four kings against the five kings. Did you free subscribers (who have access only to Sunday posts) miss eight chapters of the Bible while you were distracted about other things?

No, we mentioned the Rephaim last time, and the way we got to them is through some transitive equations. If you prefer philosophy to math, call it a syllogism:

• In 6:4, we met the Nephilim.

• In Num 13:33, we discovered that “the Anakites are part of the Nephilim.”

• Deut 2:11 tells us that the Emim, “like the Anakites, are counted as Rephaim.”

If the Anakites are one kind of Nephilim, and both they and the Emim are Rephaim, either Rephaim is another name for Nephilim, or they are an even larger group of which the mysterious Nephilim are part. So if we want to understand Gen 6:4, we had better take a look at the Rephaim. They are mysterious enough themselves, but at least there are a couple of dozen references to them in the Bible, so we’ll have an order of magnitude more data to work with. Let’s get started.

The dictionaries have decided that there are two different kinds of Rephaim: live ones and dead ones. The dead ones (three times in Isaiah, once each in Psalms and Job, and three more times in Proverbs; Roman numeral I in the dictionary) are translated as “shades” or “ghosts” and are generally found in Sheol, which as you remember from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court is the biblical name of the underworld. Here’s an example:

^{Ps 88:11} Do You work wonders for the dead?

     Do the shades [רְ֝פָאִ֗ים Rephaim] rise to praise You?    Selah.

The live ones (Roman numeral II) simply carry the name (as you see from Deut 2:11 above). In Gen 15:20, they seem to be just one of the ten nations inhabiting Canaan at the time of Abram:

¹⁹ the Kenites, the Kenizzites, the Kadmonites, ²⁰ the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephaim, ²¹ the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Girgashites, and the Jebusites.

Note that they are the only -im team of the group; all the rest are -ites, as you would expect an ethnic group to be. That’s not the only mysterious thing about them, as for example when we are told multiple times about King Og of Bashan being the last of the Rephaim:

^{Deut 3:11} Only King Og of Bashan was left of the remaining Rephaim. His bedstead, an iron bedstead, is now in Rabbah of the Ammonites; it is nine cubits long and four cubits wide, by the standard cubit!

Six feet wide is no longer that surprising; that’s actually a bit narrower than a king-size mattress. But the longest standard mattress today is seven feet long, while Og’s was 13½ feet long. Like the Nephilim in Num 13:33 — we’re reading Gen 6:4 and discussing the Nephilim; did you think I’d forgotten? — the Rephaim were giants.

What’s the connection between the different kinds of Rephaim in the Bible? HALOT says this [ר׳ is short for רפאים, that is, Rephaim]:

—2. II ‏רְ׳‎ [the live ones] is a part of the legendary preIsraelite population in Palestine, whose memory was especially preserved in Transjordan; certainly a connection exists with I ‏רְ׳‎ [the dead ones], insofar as there is preserved in II ‏רְ׳‎ a certain memory of the ancient Syro-Canaanite cult of the ancestors, the shades, or the heroes (I ‏רְ׳‎); according to Parker, the earlier power of the dead is now represented in the enormous physical size of this legendary race.

With regard to the meaning (if any) of this word, they write:

the derivation of the sbst. [substantive, = noun] is uncertain: either from the vb. I רפא, in which case the traditional vocalisation may have come secondarily from an original רֹפְאִים “healers” … or a sbst. from the vb. רפה, which would then mean “the weak”

If this is an ancient Canaanite word, we would hope to find it all the way back in Ugaritic, and indeed we do. The Dictionary of the Ugaritic Language defines it this way:

1) “divine ancestral hero”, ancestor of the Ugaritic dynasty, singly and as a group;

2) Rpu, eponymous deity of this group;

3) in the expression mtrpi [an epithet of King Danil which I understand as “Rephaim guy”]

All of this tells me that the Rephaim, even if they are people, are not ordinary people. They seem to bridge the gap between human beings and the otherworldly. If our Nephilim are Rephaim, they fit perfectly into this story where the sons of the gods marry the daughters of the humans.

But there’s something more here too, I believe. Eight of the 19 biblical references to the living Rephaim name a place: Emek Rephaim. In modern Jerusalem, Emek Rephaim is an upscale shopping street; but עֵֽמֶק émeq is Hebrew for valley, and the modern street follows what in biblical times was a valley. Stick with me, now.

Sometimes, the Septuagint simply takes עֵמֶק־רְפָאִים as a place name and transliterates it:

^{Josh 18:16} Then the boundary descended to the foot of the hill by the Valley of Ben-hinnom at the northern end of the Valley of Rephaim [עֵ֥מֶק רְפָאִ֖ים / Εμεκραφαϊν = emeq rafain]; then it ran down the Valley of Hinnom along the southern flank of the Jebusites to En-rogel.

The Greek translator of Chronicles made a different choice, though:

• ^{1 Chron 14:9}

  • The Philistines came and raided the Valley of Rephaim.

  • ‎‏ וּפְלִשְׁתִּ֖ים בָּ֑אוּ וַֽיִּפְשְׁט֖וּ בְּעֵ֥מֶק רְפָאִֽים׃

  • καὶ ἀλλόφυλοι ἦλθον καὶ συνέπεσον ἐν τῇ κοιλάδι τῶν γιγάντων.

Yes, those are gigantōn, the “giants” (see also 1 Chron 11:15).

The books of the Bible were not all translated into Greek at once by the same person, but by different people in different eras. The translator of 2 Samuel 5 made an even more interesting choice, in v. 18, the verse copied (in Hebrew) by the Chronicler when he wrote 1 Chron 14:9:

• ^{2 Sam 5:18}

  • The Philistines came and spread out over the Valley of Rephaim.

  • ‏וּפְלִשְׁתִּ֖ים בָּ֑אוּ וַיִּנָּטְשׁ֖וּ בְּעֵ֥מֶק רְפָאִֽים׃

  • καὶ οἱ ἀλλόφυλοι παραγίνονται καὶ συνέπεσαν εἰς τὴν κοιλάδα τῶν τιτάνων.

This is a valley, and these are giants, but this is not the Valley of the Jolly Green Giant. It is the Valley of the Titans.

Titan, in Greek mythology, any of the children of Uranus (Heaven) and Gaea (Earth) and their descendants. According to Hesiod’s Theogony, there were 12 original Titans … Zeus and his brothers and sisters finally defeated the Titans after 10 years of fierce battles. The Titans were then hurled down by Zeus and imprisoned in a cavity beneath Tartarus.

What connects the Greek Titans and the Hebrew Rephaim, and how that understanding changed over the centuries, is a little above my pay grade; but I can tell you that we will meet Hesiod again before we are through with this subject. In any case, someone thought the Nephilim of our verse were (1) giants, and (2) associated with the divine realm. We’ll talk more about that next time.